On November 19th, Jacques successfully defended his PhD thesis titled “Singularities and Topological Solitons as Functional Elements in Liquid Crystal Coatings.”
Jacques’s work focused on self-assembly strategies to create complex and elegant defect structures in liquid crystals, resulting in smooth and highly resolved director fields that translate into well-defined, reversible surface topographies.
In his thesis, Jacques developed several approaches combining large-scale patterning with bottom-up processes. Complex dynamic phenomena hosted within liquid-crystal media were harnessed and protected through photopolymerization, enabling the fabrication of intricate surface morphologies that reversibly switch from indentations to protrusions in response to thermal stimuli.