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=Patricia Cladis=

Patricia Cladis is a Canadian American physicist specializing in the physics of liquid crystals. She is currently a research physicist at Bell Labs, where she has worked since 1972. She is a fellow of the American Physical Society and has also received a Guggenheim fellowship.

Education
In 1959, Patricia Cladis earned her B.A. in combined Honours Mathematics and Physics from the University of British Columbia. She then went on to acquire her M.A. in Physics from the University of Toronto in 1960. She received her PhD in Physics with a concentration in superconductivity from the University of Rochester in 1968.

Career
From 1960-1962 Cladis was a meteorologist at Transport Canada, the governmental department of transport, before moving on to be a Programmer-Analyst at KCS Ltd. until 1963. From 1963-1964 she was an Assistant Professor of Physics at Western Connecticut State University. For the following four years until 1968 she was a Research Assistant at the University of Rochester. She then conducted research at the University of Paris (Orsay) for three years, where she worked with the Orsay Liquid Crystal Group researching her field of specialty, the physics of liquid crystals. *This group's founder, Professor Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, went on to receive the Nobel Prize in 1991 for his work on liquid crystals and polymers.* In 1972 she went on to work at Bell Labs as a research physicist, continuing her work in liquid crystals.

She held visiting appointments at a number of institutions, including Northwestern University, where she was the recipient of the Edith Kreeger Wolf Distinguished Professor award, an endowment given by the Gender and Sexuality Studies department of Northwestern University to recognize women who have made major contributions to their fields. Other institutions include University of Paris (Orsay), Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, École Normale Supérieure, Weizmann Institute of Science, University of Duisburg-Essen, and University of Bayreuth.

She was appointed a fellow of the American Physical Society in 1983, and later received the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993. She also received the Humboldt Prize, an award which "recognizes lifetime achievements and facilitates international scientific collaboration". She was on the Editorial Board of Liquid Crystals from 1986-1993. She is a board member of the International Liquid Crystal Society.

Research Area
Cladis' concentration in her graduate studies was in the field of superconductivity. She specializes in the physics of liquid crystals, and her research has focused on liquid crystals throughout her entire career. She joined Bell Labs to continue her work on liquid crystals, researching "their material properties and processing". She is "well- known for her work on liquid crystal defects, her discovery of the reentrant nematic phase, and her work on phase transitions and pattern formation in liquid crystals". Her more recent interests are patterns in complex fluids, which includes polymers; she wrote a book in 1995 about patterns in complex systems. One example of the applications of liquid crystals is in LCD displays.

Publications
She is the author or co-author of more than 130 publications, including multiple books. Her best-known book was published in 1995 entitled ''Spatio-temporal patterns in nonequilibrium complex systems".