Prizes & Awards

Emerging Soft Matter Excellence Award

The application window for the DSOFT Emerging Soft Matter Excellence (ESME) Award is now open! We encourage all PhD students to apply to be part of the 2026 cohort of ESME finalists and have a chance to earn the prestigious 2026 ESME Award.

The DSOFT Emerging Soft Matter Excellence (ESME) Award recognizes an exceptional graduate student pursuing research in soft matter physics. To be considered for the ESME Award the student must:

1. be a DSOFT member; 

2. be currently pursuing a PhD;

3. not have completed the PhD requirements before the October 16, 2025 application deadline. 

The DSOFT ESME committee will select 12 finalists who will be invited to give a 12-minute talk in a special DSOFT Awards Session at the 2026 APS Global Physics Summit. Finalists will also be invited to a special celebratory dinner with the DSOFT Chair, Early Career Faculty Awardee, and ESME Committee. 

The DSOFT Awards Session will be open to all Summit attendees and advertised broadly to DSOFT members. Following the Session, the ESME Committee will select the ESME Award winner based on the quality of the candidate’s research, their presentation, and their response to questions. The winner will be announced and recognized at the DSOFT Business Meeting, and will receive an award certificate and $250 honorarium.

Call for Nominations

To apply for the Emerging Soft Matter Excellence Award, eligible graduate students should complete the ESME Application, which consists of:

1. An abstract for a contributed talk in one of the DSOFT sorting categories at the Summit.

2. Proof of abstract submission,

3. A curriculum vitae (2 page limit - longer CVs will not be considered),

4. A research statement (<3000 characters) describing your research and its impact on soft matter physics

5. A nomination statement (<5000 characters) from a faculty member familiar with you and your work. A link will be sent to your nominator to submit their nomination when you submit your application. Nominators can only make one nomination per year and their nominations are due October 16, 2025..

Complete Applications are due October 16, 2025. Finalists will be notified in November 2025.

2025 ESME Awardee

Congratulations to Nico Schramma from the University of Amsterdam who was awarded the 2025 Emerging Soft Matter Excellence Award (ESME)! Nico was awarded the prize for research on light-controlled chloroplast network-morphodynamics in single-celled algae.

The ability of photosynthetic organisms to convert light into biochemically available energy is the basis for most life on earth. At the same time, too much light can be detrimental for an organisms survival. Plants and algae have to constantly cope with fluctuating light. Besides biochemical and developmental mechanisms, they have evolved the ability to re-arrange their intracellular structure by collectively moving their chloroplasts - light harvesting organelles - within their cell-body to adaptively tune the overall light absorption. 

We uncover that the bioluminescent dinoflagellate Pyrocystis lunula, native to dim light conditions in the ocean, can rearrange its intracellular structure efficiently by rapidly contracting a topologically complex network of chloroplasts that spans throughout the cell.

By exploiting buckling of the active network strands it exhibits mechanical deformation similar to that of meta-materials, resulting in efficient compaction within the cell wall confinement. 

Ultimately, we control the cell using dynamic light stimulation, and uncover that the cell's response follows rules similar to temporal low-pass filtering - an elegant adaptation process at a single-cell level toward environmental fluctuations. Besides the physiological and ecological relevance, the light-controlled morphodynamics of the chloroplast network represents a well-controlled active matter system, manifesting a biological metamaterial.