School Physicist of the Year Award

By Mohammad Ahmadi and Jennifer Anderson

The School Physicist of the Year Award is an event held every year to celebrate the achievements of students who excel at Physics. This year Jenny Anderson and myself from St Thomas More were presented with prizes. This year’s event was held at Northumbria University and was hosted by Dr Antonio Portas. The awards ceremony also included a lecture on soft matter physics, which was presented by Dr Rodrigo Ledesma-Aguilar. Soft matter physics is a convenient term for materials that are easily deformed by thermal fluctuations and external forces. Some applications of soft materials in our everyday lives include structural and packaging materials, foams and adhesives, cosmetics and paints, to name a few. The event was a great experience overall and allowed me to walk away with extra knowledge about a branch of Physics which I had not previously seen before.

– Mohammad Ahmadi

The awards evening was both excellent and engaging – a fantastic experience. Through it I was able to see how Physics is used in so many ways in our modern day society, for example 3D printers and UV light. Furthermore, the lecture (on the subject of Soft Matter Physics) showed how Physics can be used to further develop our society but more interestingly how inspiration for this can be drawn from the natural world. I was delighted to have attended the evening.

– Jennifer Anderson