Samuel Safran

Samuel A. Safran has been a professor in the department of Materials and Interfaces at Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel, since 1990 and is the first incumbent of the Steinfeld Professorial Chair. He was appointed Vice President of the Weizmann Institute in 2001 after serving as Dean of its Feinberg Graduate School for six years. He has been a senior staff physicist in the Complex Fluid Physics group at Exxon Research and Engineering, Annandale, New Jersey. His research applies the theoretical concepts of condensed matter physics to the understanding of soft matter including the structure, phase behaviour, and dynamics of interfaces, membranes, and self-assembly. Specific topics include phase behaviour and structure of colloidal, self-assembling and biomaterials, surface phase transitions, wetting dynamics, and the mechanics/thermodynamics of cells and membranes. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, on the editorial board of Langmuir, and an editor of several volumes on the physics of complex fluids.