Soft Matter Young Investigator Meet 2018

Dear Colleagues,

The soft-matter community in India has grown tremendously over the last few years with a large number of scientists working actively in this area. As a result of this, four meetings were held in Pondicherry and Goa, which brought together young scientists to present and exchange ideas under the banner "Soft-Matter: Young Investigators Meeting (SM-YIM)". These meetings helped nurture
collaborations amongst PhD students, post-doctoral fellows as well as scientists who have taken up faculty positions in India in the last few years. These meetings have been extremely beneficial in connecting a rapidly growing interdisciplinary community, from academia and industry working on colloidal /polymer /granular matter dynamics, self assembly of mesoscopic structures and the interface of soft matter and biology. The aim is to learn from each other and to build collaborations across disciplines in the basic and engineering
sciences.To continue this process, the 2018 meeting will be held during 23-25 May at Koti resorts, Shimla. We invite you to participate in the meeting. By participating, you will :
   - -- Get an opportunity to meet other early career soft matter
researchers in the country
   - -- Build collaborations
   - -- Spend 2.5 days in an informal setting in an atmosphere
conducive for extended discussions

In the spirit of the last four meetings, we hope to maintain this program as a self-funded event with a registration fee which will cover the hotel stay, breakfast, lunch and local transportation. In the last four years, conferences fees have been approximately Rs 10,000. We have kept similar participation fee this time for SMYIM2018. We are hoping, in addition, to being able to sponsor a small number of senior Ph.D students, postdocs, and faculty without sources of funding.All information about the meeting will be available here: http://www.smyim.in. 
We will continue to update the website with further details, whenever available. Since this meeting will be participatory in nature, we hope you will circulate this email to all your colleagues who might be interested in being a part of the soft-matter community.Hoping to see you in Shimla.

SMYIM2018 Organisers