Dear members of the International Liquid Crystal Society,
With great sadness, we write to share news of the sudden passing of Luz Martínez-Miranda, Professor of Materials Science and Engineering. We are heartbroken by her loss.
Luz was an internationally recognized physicist in our field of iquid crystals and their characterization using X-ray scattering techniques. She was a prolific author, with over 90 journal publications, and wrote a book titled “Liquid Crystals in Photovoltaics: An Introduction.” Her recognition led to being elected a fellow of the American Society for the Advancement of Science in 2004 and the American Physical Society (APS) in 2007. Later in 2014, she received the APS Edward A. Bouchet Prize, and in 2016 was selected for the Fulbright Foreign Student Program to work at the University of Chile. For these and many other achievements, her work set trends that have shaped the course of our field.
Luz was a graduate of the University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras, where she obtained both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics. She then obtained a doctoral degree in the same discipline from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), under the guidance of Robert Birgeneau in 1985. Her thesis was titled “Crossover Behavior and Fluctuations in the Vicinity of a Liquid Crystal Multicritical Point”. She was at the time one of the eight female students enrolled in the MIT Department of Physics. She began a postdoctoral appointment at the University of California, Berkeley until 1987, and joined the University of Pennsylvania as an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, with a secondary appointment in Materials Science and Engineering.
She joined the University of Maryland in 1995 as an assistant professor in the then-Department of Materials and Nuclear Engineering, and was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 1998, and to full professor in 2023.
She was the third and first female president of the National Society of Hispanic Physicists, and also served on committees for the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science and the APS. She played a crucial role in the University of Maryland Materials Research Science and Engineering Center, directing the minority outreach program, and served as a student advisor for more than 25 years.
A woman of many talents, she studied musical performance alongside her physics degrees and, in particular, knew how to play the harpsichord, a baroque instrument. Like great music, we believe Luz’s contributions to our society will stand the test of time, and we will remember the impact she made on our lives.
Dr. Lourdes Salamanca-Riba, Professor Emerita - University of Maryland
and
Prof. Dr. Eduardo Soto-Bustamante - University of Chile
