We hosted Frontiers in Soft Matter and Macromolecular Networks – a day-long symposium with 101 participants and a weekend DMREF workshop–at University of San Diego. The event, disseminated via a website that the PI maintains www.sdsoftmatter.com, brought together our DMREF team and faculty, postdocs, graduate students, undergraduates and high school students from across the country. We hosted industry reps who helped sponsor the event, building bridges between academia and industry and providing networking opportunities for students and future employers. The symposium featured two keynotes and 10 lightning junior faculty talks. The poster session featured 50 posters from non-faculty participants.

The DMREF weekend workshop provided experimental training and community building opportunities for students from the 5 collaborating institutions, facilitated theory-experiment feedback among the team, sparked new collaborations with the DMREF team and symposium speakers, and served as a mini writing retreat for senior trainees and PIs.