NC State hosted an international workshop on Soft Matter Interfaces on October 6-9, 2017. This workshop is part of a U.S.-Germany research cooperation program with NC State, the Technical University of Berlin (TUB), Humboldt University and the Max Planck Institute for Colloid & Interface Science. The program has been led by NC State Professors Keith Gubbins and Carol Hall and the center of its activities at NC State has been with 8 faculty research groups (Keith Gubbins, Carol Hall, Jan Genzer, Orlin Velev, Rich Spontak, Michael Dickey, Stephan Franzen and Melissa Pasquinelli). UNC-CH, Duke University and University of Pennsylvania also participate in this program. In all, 22 faculty research groups are involved (11 on each side of the Atlantic), and about 35 total Ph.D. students at any given time. Since 2009, 54 German Ph.D. students have spent six-month visits at the partner U.S. universities and 38 of these have been at NC State. Approximately 20 NC State graduate students have made reciprocal visits to Berlin. The cooperation has led to 37 joint scientific publications in leading international journals. The conference took place on October 6-9, 2017 at the NC State College of Textiles, and was attended by 54 participants (21 faculty and 33 Ph.D. students), 26 of whom were from Germany. There were 26 technical presentations, all but two of which were delivered by the U.S. and German graduate students. KIETS support is leveraged with support from the National Science Foundation and the German Science Foundation under their Graduate College Program.
