Awards of the 2017 Fredericks Medals for physics and chemistry of liquid crystals

Mikhail Osipov graduated from the Physics Faculty of Moscow State University in 1979, and in 1983 defended his Ph.D. thesis. In the period 1983–2000, heworked in the theoretical department of the Institute of Crystallography of the Russian Academy of Sciences and in 1991 defended his doctoral dissertation on the theory of the condensed state. Since 2000, M. Osipov has been working as professor of applied mathematics at the University of Strathclyde in the United Kingdom, where between 2000 and 2009, he was the head of the group of continuum mechanics, which was formerly headed by Professor F. Leslie, a world-famous expert in the field of the mathematical theory of liquid crystals. Since 2015, M. Osipov also works as a main scientific employee of the A. V. Topchiev Institute of Petrochemical Synthesis of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Professor Osipov is one of the world’s leading experts in the field of the molecular theory of liquid crystals and related materials. He has published more than 150 scientific articles and 8 reviews. M. Osipov made important contributions to the molecular and phenomenological theory of thermotropic and lyotropic liquid crystals. A fundamental impact was made to the theory of ferroelectric liquid crystal ordering, phase transitions, the theory of elasticity, viscosity, flexoelectric, dielectric and surface properties of liquid crystals, the theory of cholesteric ordering in low-molecular LC and liquid-crystal polymers, and, in recent years, in the molecular theory of liquid-crystalline and polymeric nanocomposites. Osipov is an active member of the international liquid crystal community. In the period 2006–2011, he was a member of the editorial board of the international journal ‘Liquid Crystals’, and in 2010 he was elected as a member of the Award Committee of the International Liquid Crystal Society (ILCS), on which he served until recently. At various stages, Osipov was a member of International Organizing Committees and Program Committees of International and European Conferences on LCs, as well as International Conferences on ferroelectric LCs. Since 2018, he is a member of the Newton Fund Commission in the United Kingdom. Professor Osipov regularly presents invited talks and lectures at International Conferences and Schools. In 2008, he was a visiting Mercator professor at the University of Stuttgart with the financial support of the German Scientific Foundation (DFG), which nominated him for this position. Mikhail Osipov was also a visiting professor at the Technical University of Chalmers (Sweden, 1998) and the University of Montpellier II (France, 2007). In the period from 1991 to 1999, he was a Fellow of the Humboldt Foundation and the Science Foundation of Japan, and also worked at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, as well as the universities of Southampton, Exeter and Lisbon as a visiting researcher. M. Osipov was one of the organisers of the six-month scientific school ‘Mathematics of Liquid Crystals’, conducted at the Newton Institute in Cambridge in 2013. In 2015, he was awarded the Hilsum Medal of the British Liquid Crystal Society (BLCS) for outstanding achievements in molecular LC theory.