Congratulations to Torsten Hegmann, Ph.D., and his research group for leading an international collaboration and publishing their work in Science Advances! Their article, titled “Effects of shape and solute-solvent compatibility on the efficacy of chirality transfer: Nanoshapes in nematics” was featured on the Science Advances website. Hegmann is an Ohio Research Scholar and serves as the Director of the Advanced Materials and Liquid Crystal Institute (AMLCI) as well as a professor in both the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the Materials Science Graduate Program in the College of Arts and Sciences at Kent State University. 
To read the full article, visit: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abl4385.
"The work is an experimental and theoretical approach to predict and experimentally confirm the efficacy of chirality transfer (transfer of optical activity) from a chiral object to its surroundings with implications in understanding nature's homochirality (i.e. the fact that living things on our planet share D-sugars and L-amino acids as building blocks and not their mirror-image analogues) as well as various technological applications," Hegmann said.
Kent State collaborators and co-authors on this publication included Diana P. Gonçalves Schmidt, assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Materials Science Graduate Students Ahlam Nemati, Corinne Callison, and Sasan Shadpour.
Hegmann joined the university in 2011 as an associate professor and Ohio Research Scholar in Science and Technology of Advanced Nanomaterials. He previously served as a professor at the University of Manitoba (Canada) from 2003-2011 and served as an adjunct associate professor there from 2011-2015. He is also the co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer at Torel LLC and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC). He also served as the interim director of ReMedIKS, the Regenerative Medicine Initiative at Kent State from 2012-2015.
His research lab group, the Liquid Crystal & Nanocomposite Laboratory at the AMLCI, focuses on nanomaterials, specifically soft matter dispersions and composites; synthesis, self-assembly, and applications of anisometric nanomaterials; and biomedical applications.
To learn more about Dr. Hegmann's Lab and research, visit: https://www.personal.kent.edu/~thegmann/Welcome.html