When does the leisurely activity of punting on the UK’s River Cam turn into an experiment to simulate the nonequilibrium dynamics of microscopic rod-like colloidal particles? When the participants are also attendees of a summer school that seeks to educate them on the latest in complex materials research and immerse them in the local culture.
“[We’re] bringing together top scientists as speakers and early-career scientists as future leaders in the research fields at the interface of condensed-matter physics, materials science, and optics and photonics,” says Ivan Smalyukh, a condensed-matter physicist at the University of Colorado Boulder. Smalyukh is also cofounder and coordinator of the Inter-Continental Advanced Materials and Photonics Summer School (I-CAMP), which held its fifth annual session for 10 days in June and July at the University of Cambridge. Europe is the fifth continent to take a turn at hosting I-CAMP. Previous stops were in Asia (China), Australia, South...
