Integrated Calendar

Our research group aims at the generation of new functional organic materials and devices in the areas of sustainable energy, water management, and healthcare. We use a complete chain of knowledge i.e. from synthesis to device fabrication. The materials are made by utilizing top-down and bottom-up strategies. The bottom-up structuring of the polymers is often performed via self-organization of reactive liquid crystals because of their ability to self-organize into defect-free, monolithic structures with a wide variety of molecular and mesoscopic architectures. As top-down techniques, ink-jet printing and photolithography are used. In my lecture responsive polymer liquid crystalline materials with new functionalities will be presented that can be used as soft-actuators, sensors and nanoporous membranes.

Medical treatment enjoys revolutionary progress with the advent of molecular biology and tissue/cell- targeted therapies. Psychiatric treatment, for which there is no target tissue, lags behind. In this lecture I will present the sequence of describing Post-traumatic Stress Disorder and exploring its putative biology in our laboratory, and others, to illustrate some of the difficulties of going backward from Bedside to Bench in psychiatry. Specifically, the phenotype's complexity and instability have defied, so far, any simplistic biological model. Models of higher complexity have not been clearly formulated. Psychiatric nomenclature and classification must be challenged as well.