Noel Clark

Biographie:
Noel Clark received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1970 and spent the next seven years in the Harvard liquid crystal group with Peter Pershan, Bob Meyer, and Ron Pindak, first as a research fellow and then as junior faculty. In 1977 he moved to the University of Colorado, Boulder where he is currently a Professor in the Department of Physics. 

He has worked in many areas of soft condensed matter/complex fluid physics, mostly liquid crystals and colloids. Research highlights include initiating, while at Harvard, the study of ultrathin freely-suspended liquid crystal films; discovery, with Sven Lagerwall, of the surface stabilized ferroelectric liquid crystal phenomenon; and observation, with the Boulder team, of macroscopic chiral domains in a liquid crystal of achiral molecules. 

From 1994 to 2021 he was Director of the UC Boulder Materials Research Science and Engineering Center, a National Science Foundation-funded block Grant focusing on soft materials. 

He is a Fellow of the Americal Physical Society and shared the 2006 APS Buckley Prize in Condensed Matter Physics with Bob Meyer for work on chiral and ferroelectric liquid crystals. He is an Honored Member of the ILCS, and the inaugural awardee of the ILCS Pierre Gilles Degennes Prize. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences.

Titre de la communication:
Polarization self-fields in ferroelectric liquid crystals