We are pleased to invite you to participate in a symposium to address "Fundamentals and Applications of Mesoscopic Self-Assembly" at the University of Chicago. This three day event is sponsored by the University of Chicago's Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) and is part of an industrial relations series that regularly surveys recent advances in important areas of materials research.

Some specially prepared systems have a natural tendency to organize themselves into complex, hierarchical, and tantalyzingly beautiful structures. Many of these self-assembled systems possess well ordered features ranging from atomic to macroscopic scales. Consequently, they have great promise as the basis for new mesoscopically ordered materials and devices which could not be created in any other way. Standing between this promise and its realization is a fundamental difficulty: In many cases, the phase transitions and kinetic pathways leading to these self-assembled structures are incompletely understood, and thus incompletely controlled. This workshop is focused on recent progress in understanding and controlling the many-body collective transformations involved in self-assembly. It addresses new applications in which self-assembled materials have yielded marketable devices as well as potential applications toward which progress is still required.

Click here for a tenative list of speakers.

Attendees are asked to register here no later than April 16.