Celebrating Soft Matter's 15th anniversary

When deGennes coined the term “Soft Matter” roughly four decades ago, it would be hard to imagine the vast umbrella this term has come to signify. Indeed, polymer science, biopolymers, nanocomposites, and liquid crystals have seamlessly come together with active matter and granular media to define this evolving field of exciting, cutting-edge research, which spans from fundamentals to applications. Our journal, which was begun as a forum to highlight this broad-spectrum convergent research, has become one where archival work in these (and related) topics find their natural home. To emphasize, highlight and celebrate the various intellectual thread ideas in the research field, we have taken the occasion of our 15th anniversary to commission 15 thought leaders to write their personal perspectives on what they think is “cool”, and where they think their sub-field is evolving towards (we term this 15 on 15 or more simply 15/15). These perspectives will be published in upcoming issues throughout 2019. As you might imagine it has been difficult to capture all of the different research streams into 15 independent articles – any errors of omission are thus not of oversight but simply of this (somewhat arbitrary) numerical constraint. We hope that you find this snapshot, which non-comprehensively represents the breadth of research published in Soft Matter, of interest. Here's looking to the next 15 years and beyond!

Prof. Darrin Pochan, Soft Matter Editor-in-Chief, University of Delaware, USA

Prof. Sanat Kumar, Soft Matter Associate Editor, Columbia University, USA

Dr Neil Hammond, Soft Matter Executive Editor, Royal Society of Chemistry, UK

Prof. Darrin Pochan

Prof. Sanat Kumar

Dr Neil Hammond

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