Thank you, Klaus, for the kind introduction.

I also want to thank the organizers for organizing a fantastic meeting, meeting a lot of people

having different applications with AUC.

Our applications are primarily from the synthetic polymer side.

I'm trying to tell you a little bit about what are the concepts that we follow in polymer

analysis.

So, if we look at the historical evolution of polymers and colloids in science, it was

basically a history of instrumental tools developed to understand what are polymers

and colloids.

And what happened at some point is that after getting instrumental, people started finding

applications for those polymers.

And those applications could be chemical in nature, so we would find what proteins are,

what protein structures are, we would discover polymers such as polyethylene glycols and

create lipid nanoparticle vaccines, et cetera.

But there was also a development that redox polymers were discovered, first polymeric

radicals, and 2015, the first polymer redox flow battery was basically reported.

So why I'm telling you this, I'm telling you this because if we look at the history

of science, we need to look at important people contributing to it.

And there's one guy, this is Hermann Staudinger, and he's the father of the intrinsic viscosity.

And the intrinsic viscosity is a contribution of a solute to the viscosity of the solution.

So it's infinite delusion viscosity.

Then there was a guy, Svetberg, who told us about what sedimentation and sedimentation

coefficients are, and his PhD student, Ole Lam, who developed the famous Lam equation

that allowed us to assess sedimentation as well as diffusion coefficients.

So what are we interested in?

We are interested in polymers, colloids, structure of matter on different length scales.

We want to characterize a composition, but we also want to characterize them on all length

scales.

And what is very important is that we are talking about dispersed systems.

So they are dispersed in a medium, but they are also dispersed considering their chemical

composition, et cetera.

So looking at this length scales, we can come from a single digit nanometer length scale

in which we look at polymers, in which we look at larger aggregates, and we can look

at even larger constructs, which are complex nanoscale drug delivery systems, for example,

the lipid nanoparticles.

How can we assess their properties?

Their properties can be assessed by a fundamental set of things, and those things are hydrodynamic

separation techniques.

So if you go into an AF4 conference, they will tell you light scattering is nothing

without hydrodynamic separation before light scattering.

We can use this light scattering to look at individual fractions, at dispersed subpopulations

of matter, but we can look at the very fundamental properties that we have that are densimetric

and viscometric properties that we heard as well about in this conference.

A key technique that we use across all the sciences in which we basically put everything

inside into is an analytical ultracentrifuge because it can give you important properties

of the materials that are next to sedimentation as well as diffusion coefficients.

Another interesting aspect that we are recently following is that as well coupling hydrodynamic

separation techniques to synchrotron-based radiation techniques because both worlds are

essentially very complementary.

So if we go for the intrinsic viscosity, Hermann Staudinger tried to explain what color it's