APS DFD 2026 Heads to Orlando — Why the Soft Matter and Colloidal Community Should Be There
The Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics is the largest fluid-mechanics gathering in the world, and the 79th edition will run November 22–24, 2026, in Orlando, Florida. For researchers working at the boundary between soft matter and fluid mechanics — colloidal hydrodynamics, active matter, microfluidics, low-Reynolds-number flows, complex fluids — DFD is the one meeting where talks across all of these areas happen in the same building, on the same days, with the same audience moving between sessions.
What you actually find at DFD
DFD is a pure fluid-mechanics meeting in scope but exceptionally broad in technique. A typical year fills several hundred sessions across turbulence, biological flows, geophysical and environmental flows, computational and experimental methods, multiphase systems, complex fluids, microfluidics, instabilities, and active matter. Sessions are short and dense — ten-minute talks back-to-back — which is excellent for sampling adjacent subfields and discovering work you would not have searched for. The best part of any DFD is the conversation between sessions: the meeting deliberately schedules long coffee breaks and a poster session that runs into the evening so that early-career researchers and senior scientists end up at the same table.
The Gallery of Fluid Motion runs alongside the technical program. Submitted videos and posters of striking flow visualizations are judged for both scientific content and aesthetic quality. Several have become canonical teaching images; the gallery is also a recruiting ground for new collaborations across experimental and computational groups.
Why this meeting matters for soft matter
DFD is where soft matter physics meets the broader fluid mechanics community in person. The microfluidics, complex fluids, and active matter sessions draw groups working on colloidal suspensions, emulsions, granular flow, biofilms, electrohydrodynamics, polymer rheology, swimming microorganisms, and the rest of the low-Reynolds zoology. Adjacent sessions on instabilities, biological flows, and computational methods often turn up techniques and questions that map directly onto soft-matter problems but get framed differently. For a graduate student or postdoc whose research lives at the intersection — diffusion in confined geometries, hydrodynamics of magnetic colloids, transport in active suspensions — DFD will sharpen both the physics and the methods.
Puerto Rico and the Caribbean region have a growing presence at DFD, and the Orlando location makes the trip especially accessible from the island for the first time in several years.
Logistics
Dates: November 22–24, 2026
Location: Orlando, Florida
Official meeting site: dfd-meeting.aps.org
APS DFD 2026 event page: aps.org/events/2026/dfd-annual-meeting-2026
Abstract submission: Opens in summer 2026 with an early-August deadline in the recent pattern — consult the official site for confirmed dates and the registration window.
An invitation
If your research touches fluid mechanics in any form — colloidal, granular, biological, electrokinetic, computational — submit an abstract and come. For students and postdocs in the Córdova-Figueroa group and across UPRM more broadly: this is the right meeting to present early-stage results, meet the senior scientists whose papers you read, and find out what the rest of the field is doing in person. Block the dates, check the official site for the abstract deadline as soon as it posts, and start writing.
