Liquid Crystals through Experiments (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781627052993)

Professor Dr Mojca Čepič started her career as a high school teacher of physics. After a few years she left the school and became a PhD student in a program financed by the Slovenian Agency for Science and Development called Young researchers and graduated in theoretical studies of soft matter physics, more precisely, by development of a phenomenological theoretical model describing phases in antiferroelectric liquid crystals at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. After finishing her PhD she started to work as an assistant for physics at the Faculty of Education, University of Ljubljana, where she has returned to teaching physics. Today she is the lecturer of physics, physics education and science education within university programs for future teachers of physics, teachers of science and for primary school teachers. She is still actively involved in theoretical soft matter physics, mainly in liquid crystals and has published over 70 articles in this field; several papers in co-authorship were published in Physical Review Letters and a review paper on antiferroelectric liquid crystals was published in Reviews of Modern Physics. Soon after she became involved in the didactics of physics, she realized that the transfer of new discoveries in physics into schools and to undergraduate programs is almost non-existent. Such an introduction is difficult as students' knowledge is usually too basic to allow them to easily understand newly discovered phenomena. Therefore she has started to construct simple, more or less hands-on experiments that reflect new research results and allow students to have personal experience and obtain new knowledge emphasizing concepts important for the physics of liquid crystals. She has become increasingly active in the field of physics education and in research in physics education. During the last few years she has had more than 20 contributions published in journals that consider physics education, she has run workshops on active learning about liquid crystals in several European locations (as well as Slovenia also Serbia, Finland, Turkey, Czech Republic and Slovakia) in Mexico and America. Several experiments directly related to liquid crystals and several experiments illustrating concepts important for understanding liquid crystals that were developed with the purpose of introducing these beautiful new materials into education, are presented in the textbook Liquid Crystals Through Experiments.