From November 11th to December 9th, Professor An-Chang Shi from McMaster University in Canada met the students from School of Molecular Science and Engineering through a zoom conference and gave a series of lectures for five weeks. The topic of the short-term lectures was: Phase Transition Theory in Soft Matter.

Prof. An-Chang Shi received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1988. He then went to McMaster University in Canada as a Postdoctoral Fellow/Research Associate. In 1992 he became a Member of Research Stuff at Xerox Research Centre of Canada. In 1999 he rejoined the Department of Physics & Astronomy at McMaster University as an Associate Professor, and promoted to Professor in 2004. Prof. Shi is a world-renowned soft matter theorist.  His research interests include theory of phases and phase transition of soft matter, self-assembly and morphology of block copolymers, statistical mechanics of conformation of macromolecules, and theory of bilayer membranes. He has published over 200 papers (~7000 citations) in peer-reviewed journals including PNAS, PRL, JACS, and given more than 50 invited talks in international conferences. He was elected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2010.

Professor An-Chang Shi taught short-term lectures step by step, which made the students gain a good understanding of the phase transition theory in soft matter. In the first three lectures, Prof. Shi first introduced us to what soft matter is, starting from typical liquid crystals, colloids, polymers and biological materials, and summed up the common properties of soft matter; then introduced the definition and two types of methods of learning the phase transition (thermodynamic method and statistical mechanics method). In the fourth lecture, Prof. Shi first started from the ideal gas, introduced the method of studying phase transition through the density distribution function and the free energy of the system, and then introduced the mean field approximation using the example of Ising model. In the last lecture, Prof. Shi emphatically introduced several methods of mean field theory, such as the effective field method, the variational method, and Landau theory.