There has been an explosion of interest in active matter in the last few years. In the short term this has been driven by the existence of interesting, new and tractable theory problems together with the emergence of a new generation of 'table top' experiments. Fundamentally, however, it offers access to huge class of novel materials. I will review several examples of problems in active matter and complex fluids that we have been working on in my lab over the last few years. Ultimately active matter can form truly intelligent systems, including the human brain. I will conclude with an example that relates to a simple definition of 'intelligence' in active matter.

 Dr. Matthew Turner is a Professor in the Physics department, attached to the Complexity center, at Warwick University in England. He works on Biological and Soft Matter Physics, amongst other things. He obtained his PhD in theoretical soft condensed matter physics under the supervision of Prof. Mike Cates in the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University. After that he was a postdoc with Jean-Francois Joanny at the Institut Charles Sadron in Strasbourg. In 1991, he was elected a Fellow of Trinity (“under title A”), an immense privilege. After winning a Royal Society University Research Fellowship in Cambridge he moved to the University of California at Santa Barbara. Prof. Turner was then appointed to the faculty at Warwick before leaving and soon became the W M Keck fellow in the Centre for Studies in Physics and Biology, Rockefeller University from 1998-2000. In recent years he has held a Joliot-Curie visiting fellowship at ESPCI, Paris. In 2010, he became an EPSRC Leadership Fellow.