The CSRC spring school on the Physics of Active Matter was held on May 9-10, 2015.  The workshop was co-organized by Prof. Leihan Tang, Dr. Hugues Chate and Prof. Yuhai Tu, with about 100 local and overseas participants including a dozen undergraduate students.

Research on active matter has attracted great interest due to its relevance to a great variety of interdisciplinary problems ranging from self-propelled colloidal particles to flocking birds. Such systems exhibit intriguing and complex spatial-temporal patterns that defy our intuition and have only begun to be understood with the help of quantitative models, large-scale computation and advanced mathematical analysis.

During the school, eight lectures were delivered by distinguished scientists from well-known institutions worldwide. Basic concepts and tools to study active matter were introduced, including quantitative studies of various intriguing phenomena using experimental, computational, and analytical approaches.  The treatment of various issues arising from these strongly non-equilibrium and nonlinear dynamical system was discussed in detail in some of the lectures.

A poster session was organized with contributions from participants of the school. Congratulations to Daiki Nishiguchi from Tokyo University, Shuang Zhou from Kent State University, and Shouwen Wang from Beijing CSRC for winning the First Prize of poster presentations.