Conference report on the 48th German liquid crystal conference

The 48 German liquid Crystal Conference took place in the beautiful Franconian city of Würzburg (Germany) between 28 and 30 of March 2022 (Figure 1). This year, the eight sessions were chaired by Prof. Dr. Heiner Detert, Prof. Dr. Sabine Laschat, Prof. Dr. Matthias Lehmann, Prof. Dr. Heinz Kitzerow, Prof. Dr. Tommaso Bellini, Prof. Dr. Matthias Bremer, Prof. Dr. Jan Lagerwall and Prof. Dr. Frank Giesselmann. After a few difficult years of Covid-19 pandemic this year the conference was finally held on-site giving the opportunities for the scientists from around the world to meet again in person and discuss thoroughly their research in various liquid crystal fields. The event was hosted by Prof. Dr. Matthias Lehmann (University of Würzburg) and Prof. Dr. Heiner Detert (University of Mainz) and welcomed by the vicepresident for innovation and knowledge transfer Prof. Dr. Matthias Bode. The group of Lehmann did exceptional work, giving people on site as well as those who could not be on site due to a COVID-19 disease the opportunity to present their work. Due to various security measures, the conference was not held in the Toscana Room as usual. It was moved to the larger AOK auditorium at Hubland campus to still ensure distancing between the participants. This year, over 60 people (Figure 2) contributed to the conference with 21 oral presentations and 41 posters. A novelty this year were the hybrid poster appetisers. To stimulate the discussion about their poster content, volunteers briefly summarised their poster before the poster session. A total of five scientists were invited to give a talk. The conference opened with a talk by Tommaso Bellini who reported on the liquid crystalline ordering of nucleic acids and its relation to Watson Crick pairing. On the next day the morning session kicked off with a talk by Xiangbing Zheng on ferro and antiferro chirality in columnar and bicontinuous phases. The third speaker Matthias Bremer described the Merck KGaA internal discovery and the bright future of ferroelectric nematic materials. Lydia Sosa Vargas then spoke about the range of applications of self-assembled macromolecular semiconductor materials. Lastly, Dharmendra Pratap Singh summarised his work on Charge Transfer in Supramolecular Systems. Topics of the conference were spread over a broad spectrum and covered all facets of liquid-crystalline research: From the recently discovered ferronematic phase to radical core structures and biosensing in zebra fish. Many contributions provided new insight into the effects of chirality in lyotropic and thermotropic mesogens, ionic and supramolecular liquid crystals and photoactive materials. Furthermore, recent results in the manufacturing of nanoand mesoporous liquid-crystalline composite materials derived from e.g. graphene, silica and chitin were presented. Another focus in research was sustainability by means of reuse of imine-based mesogens and recycling of shrimp shells for nanomaterials. This year the Alfred Saupe Prize 2022 was awarded for the lifetime achievements of Professor José Luis Serrano Ostáriz (Figure 3), who is an exceedingly successful researcher from the University of Zaragoza. This prize is the highest award by the German Liquid Crystal Society and the Alfred Saupe foundation. Another honour was bestowed upon Dr. Richard Mandle of the University of Leeds (Figure 3). He was invited to give the Vorländer Lecture, which is given to young successful scientists at the beginning of their careers. As one of the discoverers of the ferroelectric nematic phase, he is mentioned in almost every publication on the subject. With his talk he also introduced the following session about ferroelectric nematics, one of the biggest topics this year. Furthermore, colleagues at the beginning of their scientific career were also honoured. The Young Scientist Award 2022 went to three selected presentations and one poster. It went to Christopher Schilling from the University of Stuttgart and his talk on mesomorphic IDA boronates, Paulina Rybak from the University of Warsaw who discussed the unit cell consisting of chiral columns and Pierre Nacke from the University of Stuttgart with his talk on a new example of ferroelectric nematics. Tobias Thiele received his prize for the poster on a modular approach for photoinduced helix inversion. All of them are shown in Figure 3. This year, additional book prizes were awarded. For three other posters both the traditional ‘Bocksbeutel’ bottle and a scientific textbook were awarded (Figure 3). These were awarded to Charlotte Vogler from the University of Stuttgart for her poster on the design of mesoporous silica materials, Kevin Mall Haidaraly from the Sorbonne University Paris with a submission on LIQUID CRYSTALS TODAY 2022, VOL. 31, NO. 1, 8–11 https://doi.org/10.1080/1358314X.2022.2093458