Inge Nys graduated in 2013 as Master of Science in Engineering Physics with highest distinction at the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture at Ghent University. After this, she started working at the Liquid Crystals and Photonics group at Ghent University, guided by prof. Beeckman and prof. Neyts. In the first year she received funding from the Special Research Fund (BOF) of Ghent University while the next four years of research were funded by a personal mandate from the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO). In October 2018 she finished her PhD and currently she works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Liquid Crystal and Photonics group. Her research is focused on the use of liquid crystals for tunable electro-optic devices such as diffraction gratings, lasers and smart windows. With the help of different alignment techniques she tries to stabilize new (chiral) liquid crystalline superstructures and she analyzes these structures with FE Q-tensor simulations. Currently she is also working on detailed investigation of the liquid crystal configuration inside spatial light modulators and the application of liquid crystals for AR/VR applications.
Inge presented her scientific work at 12 international conferences and she prepared different scientific manuscripts about the obtained research results. This resulted in more than 20 publications in international journals and 3 publications in conference proceedings listed in the Web of Science. She is the first author of 13 of these international journal publications and 2 of the conference proceedings. Three of her papers were selected for the back cover of Advanced Optical Materials and one has been featured on the cover of Applied Physics Letters. She also received the best student presentation award at two conferences: the OLC 2015 and the WLCP 2018. In 2020 Inge also received the highest award (of 5000 $) in the Facebook Reality Labs Liquid Crystal Research competition. She received the diamond award with her submission ’ Tilted chiral liquid crystal gratings for efficient large-angle diffraction’. In her free time, Inge likes to go cycling and walking in nature, especially in the mountains.