John W. Goodby FRS is Chair of Materials Chemistry at the University of York. Previously he was Supervisor of the Liquid Crystal Materials Group at AT&T Bell Laboratories, USA, for ten years, and Head of the Advanced Materials Group at Hull University for 15. He has received numerous awards from the Royal Society of Chemistry for his research including the Tilden Medal for advances in chemistry, the Interdisciplinary Award for work at the interfaces between chemistry and other disciplines, and the Derek Birchall Medal for creativity and excellence in the applications of materials chemistry in industry. He has been awarded the GW Gray Medal of the British Liquid Crystal Society and was made an Honored Member of the International Liquid Crystal Society. He has over 480 published research papers and holds 56 international patents. In 2011 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society.Peter J. Collings is the Morris L. Clothier Professor of Physics at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, USA and an Adjunct Professor of Physics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. He is a Fellow of both the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Prior permanent and visiting appointments include Kenyon College, Kent State University, the University of Paderborn, the Technical University Berlin, and the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC. His research and teaching experience has been recognized by several awards, including the American Physical Society Prize for Research in an Undergraduate Institution and the Alan Berman Research Publication Award of the Naval Research Laboratory.Takashi Kato is presently Full Professor at the University of Tokyo, Japan. He has published about 300 papers including original papers, reviews, and book chapters. His research focuses on supramolecular liquid crystals, stimuli-responsive materials, liquid-crystalline gels and organic/inorganic composites inspired by biomineralization. Takashi Kato received numerous prestigious honors, including the Young Chemists Award of the Chemical Society of Japan, the Wiley Polymer Science Award in Chemistry and the Award of Japanese Liquid Crystal Society.Carsten Tschierske is Professor at the Department of Organic Chemistry of the University of Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. Research in his group is centered around self-organization in liquid crystalline systems. Current efforts include bent-core mesogens, amphiphilic and amphotropic systems, multi-level segregating systems with complex superstructures as well as polar order and supramolecular chirality in soft matter. Carsten Tschierske has held visiting professor positions at the universities of Marburg, Würzburg and Fukuoka.Helen F. Gleeson is Professor of Physics at the University of Manchester, UK, and has held positions including Head of School of Physics and Astronomy and Research Dean in the Faculty of Science and Engineering at Manchester. She has published more than 130 articles and eight patents. Helen has held visiting professor positions at the Universities of Sydney, Case Western Reserve University and Griffith University in Brisbane. Her research interests involve understanding structures in thermotropic liquid crystals studied by novel X-ray scattering and optical techniques, focused particularly on the intermediate smectic phases, blue phases and phases formed from bent-core molecules. She has also used optical traps and tweezers to probe liquid crystalline systems on a mesoscopic scale. Her strong interest in applications involving liquid crystals has led to patents describing novel sensors, optical devices and to the application of graphene in liquid crystal devices. She has been awarded the Cyril Hilsum and G W Gray Medals of the British Liquid Crystal Society and the Holweck Medal and Prize, a bilateral award made by the Institute of Physics and Société Française de Physique. She was awarded the OBE (Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) in the Queen's birthday honors list in 2009 for Services to Science, recognizing her work on public understanding and encouraging more women into physics.Peter Raynes FRS is Honorary Visiting Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of York and Emeritus Professor of Optoelectronic Engineering at the University of Oxford. Previously he had been Deputy Chief Scientific Officer at the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment at Malvern, and Director of Research at the Sharp Laboratories of Europe. He has published more than 130 research papers and authored more than 60 patents in the field of liquid crystals. His research has resulted in two Queen's Awards for Technological Achievement and he has received numerous other awards. These include the Rank Prize for Opto-electronics, the Paterson Medal of the Institute of Physics, the Jan Rajchman Prize of the Society for Information Display, and the G W Gray Medal of the British Liquid Crystal Society.
