Piotr Popov

Nitto Denko Technical Corporation

Dr. Piotr Popov received his BS in Physics and Materials Science from Ivanovo State University, Russia in 2010 and completed his PhD in Physics at Kent State University in 2015. Until 2018, Dr. Popov held the role of an R&D Scientist at start-up company, RavenWindow, Inc. in Denver, Colorado where he participated in the design and development of thermochromic smart-windows using liquid crystals. Currently, Dr. Popov works at Nitto Denko Technical Corporation in Oceanside, California as a Staff Scientist. He is involved in the development of new liquid crystal technologies and the discovery of their new applications.

Oliver Kress

University of Bern, Institute for Complementary and Integrative Medicine (IKIM), Bern, Switzerland

Dr. Oliver Kress received his BS in Physics from Kent State University in 2012 and his MSc from the Liquid Crystal Institute at Kent State University in 2015. He then continued his studies as a doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen, Germany. In 2018, he received his PhD in physics from the Georg August University of Göttingen. His Ph.D studies, which focused on the viscoelastic response of reduced-dimensional free-standing liquid crystal fibers, resulted in a granted patent for a compact sub-microliter extensional rheometer, which he is currently working to commercialize. Dr. Kress is currently a SNF/Innosuisse Bridge Discovery postdoctoral fellow at the University of Bern, Switzerland and is leading a collaborative effort to develop wearable med-tech devices with a focus on wound prevention, with the intention of bringing the finished product to market.

Lawrence W. Honaker

Wageningen University & Research, Laboratory of Physical Chemistry and Soft Matter, Wageningen, The Netherlands

Dr. Lawrence Honaker received an BA in Physics from Ripon College in 2011 and an MS in Chemical Physics from Kent State University in 2014. His work at Kent State looked at biosensing with liquid crystals. In 2015, he received a grant from the Luxembourg National Research Fund to pursue a PhD at the University of Luxembourg, looking at using microfluidics for the characterization of liquid crystal interfacial tension and the wet spinning of polymer fibers containing liquid crystal and liquid metal cores. After finishing his PhD in 2019, he moved to Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands, where he mostly works as a postdoctoral researcher on microfluidics for the purposes of synthetic biology, characterization of growth and metabolic processes in living organisms, and liquid crystal-based biological and chemical sensing.

Greta Babakhanova

National Institute of Standards and Technology

Dr. Greta Babakhanova received her B.S. in Physics from San Jose State University, USA, in 2014. She completed her PhD in Chemical Physics from the Advanced Materials and Liquid Crystal Institute, Kent State University, in 2019. Her dissertation was performed in the lab of Dr. Oleg D. Lavrentovich where she worked on characterizing twist-bend nematic liquid crystals using electro- and magneto-optical methods, as well as electron microscopy techniques. She also developed stimuli-responsive liquid crystal elastomer coatings with pre-determined surface topographies and later used such coatings to grow biological cells. In 2019, Dr. Babakhanova received the National Research Council (NRC) postdoctoral fellowship. Her postdoctoral work was completed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), where she worked with Dr. Carl G. Simon, Jr. on quantitative determinations of cell viability in three-dimensional scaffolds. Currently, Dr. Babakhanova works as a Physicist in the Biomaterials Group in the Biosystems and Biomaterials Division at NIST, where she continues her multidisciplinary research to advance the field of regenerative medicine .