MNA – Iranian physicist Ramin Golestanian has been honored with the 2017 EPJE Pierre-Gilles de Gennes Lecture Prize for outstanding contributions to the field of active matter.


According to EPJ website, the European Physical Journal E – Soft Matter and BiologicalPhysics (EPJE) has awarded Iranian physicist Ramin Golestanian the 2017 EPJE Pierre-Gilles de Gennes Lecture Prize.

Golestanian was selected for his outstanding theoretical contributions to the physics of microswimmers and their hydrodynamic interactions which have led to a series of exciting new discoveries and stimulated the development of the field of active matter.

This is the sixth time this prestigious prize, named after the Nobel laureate who founded EPJE, has been awarded. The EPJE Pierre-Gilles de Gennes lecture will be delivered by Golestanian on Thursday 20th July at the 10th Liquid Matter Conference in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Ramin Golestanian completed his PhD at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Basic Sciences (IASBS) in Zanjan, Iran, under the remote supervision of Mehran Kardar from MIT. He followed with an independent postdoctoral research fellowship at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Before joining the University of Oxford in 2010 as professor of theoretical condensed matter physics, he held academic positions at IASBS and the University of Sheffield. His broad research interests include nonequilibrium statistical physics, soft matter, and biological physics. Golestanian is renowned for his work on active matter and, in particular, for his role in developing microscopic swimmers and active colloids. He is recipient of the Holweck Medal of the Société Française de Physique and the Institute of Physics, and is the author of over 130 articles in peer reviewed journals.  He recently edited a special issue on active matter in EPJE together with physicist Sriram Ramaswamy.

The EPJE Pierre-Gilles de Gennes Lecture Prize is sponsored by the European Physical Journal (EPJ) co-publishers, which consist of the Italian Physical Society (SIF) and the publishers EDP Sciences and Springer. It is awarded to outstanding scientists for their contribution to soft matter research.