Introducing JPCM’s new Liquids, soft matter and biological physics Editorial Board members

By Jade Holt on March 13, 2015

Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter welcomed Susan Perkin, Laurence Ramos and Xiangjun Xing to the Liquids, soft matter and biological physics Editorial Board in 2015. Between them, their expertise and experience make them valuable additions to this section of the journal and JPCM looks forward to working with them for the duration of their term.

Susan Perkin is Associate Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Oxford . She was awarded a DPhil (2006) in Oxford, and was elected to a Junior Research Fellowship at Merton College from 2005-2008. She moved to University College London (2007-2012) to take up an RCUK Academic Fellowship. In 2012 Susan returned to the Faculty of Chemistry at Oxford to take up an Associate Professorship, which she holds in combination with the Tutorial Fellowship in Chemistry at Trinity College. Her research interests relate to the interaction of liquids with solid surfaces and their confinement in nano-scale films or pores. Recently this has led to particular focus in the areas of nano-scale mechanisms of lubrication, and electrolytic and double-layer behaviour of ionic liquids.

Laurence Ramos is a French soft matter physicist. After graduating from ESPCI ParisTech in 1994, she obtained a PhD in Physics from University Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris, in 1997, working under the supervision of Pascale Fabre in the laboratory of Nobel Prize laureate Pierre Gilles de Gennes at Collège de France, and later completed post-doctoral research with David Weitz at the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently a CNRS Senior Researcher at Laboratoire Charles Coulomb, Montpellier University, France. Through her research experience in soft matter, she has developed skills in the structural, dynamical and mechanical characterization of soft materials. One of her specialties is her ability to design original self-assembled materials, comprising surfactants, colloids, and polymer of various architectures, to answer scientific fundamental questions and to address industrially relevant problems. She is currently working on catastrophic processes of fracture in soft materials, and on agronomy-inspired problems.

Xiangjun Xing received a PhD in Physics from University of Colorado at Boulder in 2003. He worked as a postdoc research fellow in University of Illinois during 2003-2005, as an Assistant Professor in Syracuse University during the period of 2005-2010. From June 2010, he has been a Professor of Physics at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Professor Xing’s main research interests include statistical physics and its applications in soft matter systems. His has studied the elasticity of polymeric materials, including rubbers and liquid crystalline elastomers, the critical phenomena of gelation transitions, and structures of liquid crystalline vesicles. His current research activities focus on the equilibrium statistical physics of dense electrolytes, as well as the effective interactions between charged objects immersed in these systems.