ISM Director Emanuela Del Gado Featured as Plenary Speaker at International Conference on Statistical Physics

This July, the global statistical physics community gathered in Florence, Italy, for the 29th edition of the International Conference on Statistical Physics (StatPhys29) a flagship event of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP), held every three years. The 2025 meeting brought together over 1,500 researchers from across disciplines to explore the fundamental principles shaping complex systems, from quantum fluids to biological networks.

Among the plenary speakers was Professor Emanuela Del Gado, Director of the Institute for Soft Matter Synthesis and Metrology at Georgetown University. In her talk presentation titled “Fluctuations, Rheology, and Memory in Self-Assembled Gel Networks,” Del Gado shared new insights into how soft, disordered materials respond to mechanical forces over time and how these responses are shaped by microscopic structural fluctuations.

Her talk focused on gel networks formed through self-assembly, a hallmark of soft matter systems ranging from food gels to biomaterials. Through computational and theoretical approaches, Emanuela demonstrated how these networks exhibit nontrivial rheological behaviors and “remember” past deformations, revealing the complex relationship between material structure, dynamics, and mechanical history.

Held at venues across the historic city of Florence such as the grand Salone dei Cinquecento at Palazzo Vecchio, where Nobel Laureate Giorgio Parisi opened the conference, StatPhys29 offered a vibrant week of scientific exchange, cultural connection, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Highlights of the event included the award of the Boltzmann Medal, the highest recognition in Statistical Physics and one of the most prestigious Physics recognitions, to Mehran Kardar (MIT) and Yoshiki Kuramoto (Kyoto University) for their work on stochastic field theory for surface growth and on nonlinear oscillations and synchronization respectively. IUPAP also the Early Career Scientist Prize in Statistical Physics to three researchers working on areas from non-equilibrium chemical systems to quantum chaos.

You can find a brief interview with Emanuela Del Gado in preparation of her plenary talk at this event here.

To learn more about StatPhys29, visit statphys29.org.