**About the Editors**

### **Shigeyuki Yamada**

Shigeyuki Yamada, born in Osaka, Japan, in 1980, received his PhD (Engineering) degree from the Kyoto Institute of Technology (2008). After working as a postdoc (2008–2013), he became an Assistant Professor at Ritsumeikan University in 2014. In 2016, he moved to the Kyoto Institute of Technology as an Assistant Professor, and in 2019, he was promoted to Associate Professor. His current research interests include the development of functional materials (e.g., liquid crystals and light-emitting materials) whose functions can be enhanced by introducing fluorine atoms.

### **Kyosuke Isoda**

Kyosuke Isoda, born in Saitama, Japan, in 1981, received his PhD (Engineering) degree from The University of Tokyo (2009). After working as a postdoc (2009–2011) at RIKEN, he worked as an Assistant Professor at the Tokyo University of Science (2011–2014). In 2015, he moved to Kagawa University as a Lecturer, and he was promoted to Associate Professor in 2019. In 2022, he moved to the Sagami Chemical Research Institute, and he was promoted to Group Leader of the Organic Materials Chemistry Group. His current research interests include the development of stimuli-responsive functional materials of liquid materials and liquid crystals.

### **Takahiro Ichikawa**

Takahiro Ichikawa, born in Tokyo, Japan, in 1982, received his PhD (Engineering) degree from The University of Tokyo (2013). After working as an assistant professor at the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology (2010–2015), he was promoted to Associate Professor at the same university in 2015. His current research interests include the development of functional gyroid nanostructured materials based on the molecular design of liquid crystals.

### **Kosuke Kaneko**

Kosuke Kaneko, born in Kyoto, Japan, in 1979, received his PhD (Engineering) degree from Ritsumeikan University (2007). After working as a postdoctoral fellowship at the Strasbourg Institute of Material Physics and Chemistry (IPCMS), Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) (2008–2009), and as a specially appointed Assistant Professor at Kyushu University (2009–2013), he became an Assistant Professor at Ritsumeikan University in 2013. After working on a postdoctoral fellowship at the Fukuoka Institute of Technology (2018), he returned to Ritsumeikan University as an Assistant Professor in 2019. His main activities focus on the design and synthesis of siloxane-based liquid crystalline materials and the investigation of rheological properties by controlling the liquid crystalline organization with an electric field. His recent interests include the development of deformable liquid crystalline elastomers using dual-frequency liquid crystals for creating soft actuator materials.

### **Mizuho Kondo**

Mizuho Kondo studied polymer chemistry at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and completed a Ph.D. under Prof. Tomiki Ikeda in 2009. Thereafter, he worked at the University of Hyogo as an Assistant Professor and was promoted to an Associate Professor in 2020. His research interests include photofunctional organic materials, including polymers and LCs.

### **Tsuneaki Sakurai**

Tsuneaki Sakurai received his PhD in 2012 from the University of Tokyo, Japan. He worked at Osaka University and Kyoto University as a postdoctoral fellow (2012–2014), Assistant Professor (2014–2019), and Junior Associate Professor (2019). After being selected as a member of the Leading Initiative for Excellent Young Researchers program, MEXT, Japan, in 2019, he was appointed as a Junior Associate Professor at the Kyoto Institute of Technology in 2020. His research interests involve the design, synthesis, and evaluation of the physical properties of luminescent organic materials, liquid crystals, conjugated polymers, and various supramolecular systems. He has received several awards, including The Japanese Liquid Crystal Society Young Researcher's Award (2021) and the Award for the Encouragement of Research in Polymer Science (2022).

### **Atsushi Seki**

Atsushi Seki was born in Tokyo, Japan. He graduated from the Department of Applied Chemistry, Faculty of Science and Engineering, Chuo University, in 2007. After he received Master's degree from the University of Tokyo in 2009 under the supervision of Professor Takashi Kato, he worked as an R&D staff member at Toho Chemical Industry Co., Ltd., in Japan from 2009 to 2014. In October, 2014, he joined the research group of Prof. Masahiro Funahashi in the Department of Advanced Materials Science, Faculty of Engineering, Kagawa, as a Ph.D. student. He received his Ph.D. degree from Kagawa University in September, 2017. After he worked as a researcher at Kagawa University for two months, he joined the research group of Professor Nobuyuki Tamaoki in the Research Institute for Electronic Science, Hokkaido University. He moved to the research group directed by Dr. Masafumi Yoshio in the National Institute for Materials Science as a NIMS postdoctoral fellow in February 2018. He became an Assistant Professor at the Tokyo University of Science in 2020. He received the Best Poster Award in the 16th International Conference on Ferroelectric Liquid Crystals (FLC16) in 2016. His current research interests are the development of functional soft matters including ferroelectric π-conjugated liquid crystals, stimuli-responsive supramolecular gels, and photopolymers.

### **Mitsuo Hara**

Mitsuo Hara received his B.S. (2005), M.S. (2007), and Ph.D. (2012) from Nagoya University. From 2007 to 2009, he worked at FUJIFILM Corporation. He was a JSPS Research Fellow in 2010–2012. He started his academic career at Nagoya University as an Assistant Professor. His research interests include self-assembly materials, humidity-responsive polymers, liquid crystalline materials, organic–inorganic hybrid materials, and polymer surfaces. He received The JLCS Award for the Encouragement of Research in Liquid Crystal Science, The JLCS Outstanding Paper Award in 2015 and 2018, and The SPSJ Award for the Encouragement of Research in Polymer Science in 2018.

### **Go Watanabe**

Go Watanabe received his Ph.D. degree from the Department of Pure and Applied Physics, Graduate School of Advanced Science and Engineering, Waseda University, in 2011 under the supervision of Prof. Yuka Tabe. He joined the Department of Physics, School of Science, Kitasato University, in 2012 as an Assistant Professor. Since 2023, he has been a Professor of the Department of Data Science, School of Frontier Engineering, Kitasato University. His research aims to understand the structure and dynamics of liquid crystals, functional organic materials, polymers, and biomolecules with computational science based on molecular simulations.
