Samo Kralj

Samo Kralj was awarded PhD in physics from University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, in 1991. He carried out postdoctoral education at School of Mathematics, University of Southampton (UK, 1992) and at Solid State Department, Jožef Stefan Institute (Ljubljana, 1993-1996). Currently, he is full professor at Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics at University of Maribor in Slovenia, where he is the head of the laboratory Physics of Complex Systems, vice-head of the Department of Physics, and head of the PhD study in Physics. He is also employed as Senior researcher at Solid State Department, Jozef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana. His research interests include soft materials, biophysics and nanomaterials. On these topics he has so far published about 150 papers in international journals which acquired about 3000 citations. Among others he was General chair of the 11th European Conference on Liquid Crystals (2011, Maribor, Slovenia) and General chair chair of the ESF Exploratory Workshop “Defect assembled soft matter for nanoscience and nanotechnology” (2013, Rogaska Slatina, Slovenia). He is very active as a science promotor for which he obtained “Prometej of Science” reward from the Slovenian Science Foundation (2009) and “Golden Reward” from the Society for Technical Culture of Slovenia (2015). He was rewarded for outstanding educational achievements and constantly highest marks in students’ assessments from Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics (University of Maribor, 2015) and exposed as a distinguished referee of the European Physical Journal (2015 and 2016). He is also piano player in PhD Big Bang Band at Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics at University of Maribor and active as cartoonist.