Prizes & Awards

Emerging Soft Matter Excellence Award

The DSOFT Emerging Soft Matter Excellence (ESME) Award recognizes an exceptional graduate student pursuing research in soft matter physics. Help us continue to offer this new award by giving to our fundraising campaign here.

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 10, 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 Early Career Awards Symposium at the March Meeting. Finalists will also be invited to a celebratory dinner with the DSOFT Chair and ESME Committee. 

The Awards Symposium will be open to all March Meeting attendees and advertised broadly to DSOFT members. Following the Symposium, the ESME Committee will select the ESME Awardee 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 $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 to the DSOFT program at the March Meeting.**
2. Proof of abstract submission,
3. A curriculum vitae (2 page limit - longer CVs will not be considered),
4. A nominating letter (2 page limit - longer letters will not be considered) from a faculty member familiar with you and your work. A link to provide to your nominator to submit their letter is in the ESME application. Nominators can only make one nomination per year.

Complete Applications are due October 27, 2024. Finalists will be notified in January 2025.

**To be eligible applicants must submit their abstract to the DSOFT sorting category 02.01.01: DSOFT Early Career and Student Awards Session using the general abstract submission site for the March Meeting before the general abstract deadline. In the Special Instructions space, enter "ESME Award or X” where X is your preferred DSOFT sorting category if your abstract is not selected for the ESME Symposium.

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.