 Vladimir Lormann was the original member of the organizing committee of the first workshop on physical virology in 2012. He was also the member of the editorial board for the special issue on physical virology, which was published as proceedings of that meeting. He was also the member of the organizing committee for this meeting 2017. Actually quite a few of the participants of the speakers at the meeting were suggested by him. And as he passed away last year, we decided it would be appropriate to commemorate him and his contribution. The way we envision this section is that there will be one talk by Andrea Parmigiani, his colleague at the University of Montpellier, describing a little bit the scientific endeavors of Vladimir. And then the other three talks are just standard talks of the workshop, but in one way or the other connected with Vladimir. This is the plan, so I would ask you, Andrea, to tell us a little bit about Vladimir. Then we will have a break and proceed with the other three talks. Thank you very much, Rudi, for this introduction. So it's my pleasure to be here today because I have the possibility to speak about Vladimir that was a friend, a colleague, and a teacher at the University of Montpellier. Somehow also, as you will see later, he is, let's say, the head of the initiative to join physics and biology in Montpellier. And this for some historical fact that I will try to explain, and somehow also explain also the scientific evolution and the endeavor of Vladimir in science in general. So let me tell you first that the family greets you, and they appreciate a lot the fact that there was a session in his honor. We will try to organize also something in Montpellier in the next month. And on the other side, I would like to say also that when Rudi offered me this, proposed me this initiative, I was very happy about that, but at the same time to speak about the work of Vladimir was a little bit scaring for me. Because I collaborate with Vladimir, but I recognize two things. One is the fact that he did very, very good physics. But on the other side, also the physics he proposed is unconventional and unconventional are the systems that he studied somehow. It's a very high level physics. And technically, at least for people with my background, was not always obvious to catch what he was trying to explain to me and was repeating, repeating, repeating many times. So we'll try to propose you a panorama that probably is very incomplete and also suffer of some superficiality. And I think that scientifically there are other scientists here, like Rudi and even more Sergei, that could explain to you any detail of the theory that they developed with Vladimir up to now. Recently there are publications on that. And then of course in all these dynamics, I mean, we also collaborated and we show you also some very recent work that somehow is a very symbolic, very important because somehow join different theories in the same topics in Montpellier. So I would like to start with some pictures that are quite symbolic. I would say about Vladimir activities and life and events. This was the typical object that you could find in Vladimir's office. Unfortunately, I don't have a picture of the construction he made with some magnetic beads that he was used to explain a lot of physics of liquid crystals or assemblies of proteins. But usually the door of Vladimir was open and you could enter and start to discuss. He was taking his tea quite regularly every afternoon, right? And then he had this shape that he was helping to think about his research, but they were also actually used during courses because he was an excellent teacher. So in this, you find elements of what was the physics that Vladimir was developing. And I will try to enrich this feature and to show that despite the fact that he studied many different systems, somehow there was really a common denominator in all these studies. And this denominator was the use, intensives of symmetries, the study of phase transitions and the relation that phase transitions have, for example, with the geometry. And so this touch feels of mathematical systems and the work on catastrophe theory and so on and so forth. Another picture that for me is very emblematic of the work of Vladimir are this picture that he obtained, he published quite recently in collaboration with Rudy and with Sergei. And somehow they represent the accomplishment of the beauty of this concept of symmetry you have in physics. And this was massively used to study the DNA nucleosome assemblies at the level of the chromatin fiber on one side and on the other side to study something that is very close to your topics, which is the viruses assembly and capsids. This is a very emblematic picture for me because this represents the last discussion I had with Vladimir at the Blackboard. It was actually a discussion in which you can find elements of mechanics because we were fighting along with the problem in developmental biology. And on the other side I was discussing with other people about rotary flagella. So as usually in Blackboard of theories you have such kind of mix and maybe some inspiration comes from this kind of disorder. But when Vladimir was writing something it was, he knew where he was going. That was, he was not writing a lot but when he was writing something it was really essential. So he thought a lot before making any kind of computation and so on. This Blackboard by the way to make you a little bit the story is a Blackboard in which three Nobel Prizes wrote on it and also a almost Nobel Prize was actually, is actually the owner of this Blackboard. And this owner, which is Andren Agu, who is Andren Agu, played a very important role in the scientific development of Vladimir's career and also the interface between physics and biology in Montpellier. What to say about Vladimir from my personal point of view? These are my masters. Somehow the people that started from the PhD during Jacques Perot and Frank Schulischer and then during my postdoc Irving Frye and finally when I got an assistant professor position at in Montpellier with Vladimir, I mean these are the people that somehow drove me in science and I recognized that, I mean Vladimir in the last 15 years was really a source of inspiration and beyond the simple fact of publishing, I mean he gave me a different perspective of thinking about physics and the physics of biological systems. There are suggestions that I keep very secret about the system I'm used to study, for example problems in intracellular transport and Vladimir gave me suggestions that I don't tell anybody but I'm hoping to use in the next years and this comes from a field that I would never imagine that could be put in relation with such topics. To describe in some, to start to describe in some condensate way the Vladimir activity, to be honest is an exercise which is a little bit difficult because he studied really a lot of things and he had also a period of work especially during the time in Russia in which it's not so easy to find publication in English so unfortunately I don't speak Russian and I will let you know also what kind of situation I had to leave because Vladimir was Russian and Sergei was Russian, we'll give you a small anecdotic fact a bit later. But what they did was to recover more or less the ensemble of publication of Vladimir and they took the title and they tried to make a diagram of word counting and as you can see you can find the keywords that Vladimir and his collaborator choose for the title of their work so something that in the end is quite representative and it's very interesting to find that at the center there is theory and as a matter of fact Vladimir was a very very serious theorist and for the techniques he was managing and the way he was thinking was really a theorist and I will explain to you in a few minutes also the context the scientific context in which Vladimir started his activities in Montpellier and the fact that was a real theorist was very very important when I look at the publication plus the communication Vladimir did there are other words that emerge from these clouds and you can see here you have viruses virus of course but you have also terms like order so a very peculiar point of Vladimir activity was the study of the phase transition and especially all the very sophisticated mechanism to pass from a state of disorder toward the state of order characterized by symmetries of high complexity so it's not surprising that you can find this this kind of board when you put the you consider also the communication in the ensemble of title of Vladimir production because I think that it was a very serious real concern for him to transmit this notion of transition from this order to order state of course you find other word that for you are very familiar like was a draw or mezzo phase capsid and so on and so forth so now I would like to describe to you some scientific fact the kind of short life description of by dates of Vladimir but then I will try to reinterpret all this in some partially by making also some personal consideration so Vladimir got his diploma in 1981 at the University of Rostov on the dawn in Russia and in 1988 he took his state doctorate at the University at the theoretical physics Institute of condensate matter at the University of Rostov-on-Don and the AM Prokhorov General Physics Institute at the Academy of Science in Russia very few years later 1990 and it's a year in which you know in this in the Soviet Union there is a very serious political situation Vladimir decided to fly to France so in the end is not directly to Montpellier and the map I should point before Amiens and then Montpellier but it flies to Amiens and there he started an activity as a normal post doc while I think his level was for sure the level of researcher but he had the opportunity to go to Amiens and this was the first step of his career in France so if you want to see the date after that he got an assistant or lecturer position at the University of Picardine Amiens and then in 1999 get the position of associate professor and few years later as a full professor at the University of Montpellier this transition from Russia from Rostov to Amiens and then from Amiens to Montpellier correspond to a change of topics in Vladimir scientific evolution that I will try to describe to you in a few minutes in Montpellier after that he took he didn't do only research but he took a lot of complex responsibilities at the teaching and administrative level and up to become deputy director of the laboratory of physics and organizing the interdisciplinary axis and participating to initiative of excellence like the new MAV lab X so it was really working a lot and he was working a lot by taking care also of the community that let's say start to develop just few years later is arrival in Montpellier and the community is still growing up in these days and we try to follow a little bit the perspective that Vladimir gave since the beginning of the 2000s so now let me provide you the description of Vladimir activity and also some important point about his life his scientific life these are facts that have been told to me by Vladimir and partially I really experienced directly because I joined Montpellier in 2003 so a few years later and also this is also complemented with some thought about about this point so in 1997 it took the French habilitation to be a PhD supervisor why this is important because since few years was the University of Picardie and he start to work on liquid crystals intensively and is known by Jacques Pro that at the time was director of a laboratory species in Paris and Jacques Pro is also the president of the jury of the this habilitation title that somehow allows the researcher to become independent because he can follow PhD student he can build up a team and so on and so forth and this is a picture of the discussion between Vladimir and Jacques and for me this is a very important picture because Jacques at that time was my PhD advisor and I didn't know anything about liquid crystal I knew that there was a book that he wrote with the gen and that was a very important issue in science but for me was quite scaring object liquid crystals and of course Vladimir was providing very important contribution at that time so Jacques was a person that helped him in his career and he is supported him a lot so why this is important because in 1996 there is the first big initiative to develop the interface between physics and biology and is the date in which the laboratory of physical shimikuri was born and it was a unit in which we had biologists physicists chemists working all together in the same unit and it was something quite peculiar for the French system. Jacques Pro was called as director from this PCI and this was under the suggestion of François Brochardet-Pierre Gilles Degen that push a lot to help the people in the community of soft matter to get involved in biological physics issues for last year we celebrate the 20 years of this lab and you maybe know it as a very nice place and I mean they are doing very nice things at that time I had the opportunity to be a PhD student there with Jacques and Frank so in 1997 Vladimir got the habilitation and in 1998 he participated to a school the physical of the scale at the scale of the cell that was organized by Bertrand Foucault, Jacques Pro and also Arvange Derri and this year is very important because I met Vladimir there for the first time somebody smiling at you very open and but also somebody that was when was playing some physics for me was kind of foreign language because his way of thinking was very peculiar and I will try to explain to you why this why form this way in during the time so these are here that are very important why because in 1998 Vladimir get the position of professor in Montpellier why well the very important point is the fact that Andre Neveu as a wife in biology but Andre Neveu is as main maybe you know is a is a is a great theoretical physicist that developed theory of super strings but he knew that biology was one of the new frontiers for physics so he wanted to build up a very strong activity in biological physics and in the meanwhile he was also building a very strong community in mathematical physics in Montpellier I would say in the 90s he could he could he was was able to recruit Alexei Zardmologico, Vladimir Fatayev and this is these are kind of divinities in the field of in the context of field theory and integrable systems Mikhail Dyakonov that was a theorist of the condensed matter and the electronic systems that he did the different discoveries and the first person that was recruited in this field of really pure theoreticians from the Russian school by the way was Vladimir and Vladimir was appointed of developing because of his experience in soft matter in developing the interface between physics and biology and all the history in Montpellier start at that time so I think that in this time Vladimir developed the feeling that biological physics was really a direction yet to develop his research and I will focus in the following mostly on this point although I will try also to give you a perspective from the previous year so I described to you the scientific pathways from the 80s up to now and I try to divide them in this in these sub chapters so in the 80s Vladimir is is working on general aspects of the theory of phase transition and crystallization to study condensed matter of metals alloys magnetism but he's also doing something very specific which is the interpretation of the phase transition diagram via geometrical description and the use of symmetries in a way that it was much more natural inspired let's say from the theory of the geometrical theory of dynamical systems he entered in contact with Vladimir Arnold and the interesting point is that if you get this issue from the IOP website you find afterward that the IOP suggests also to watch this paper in which Vladimir is co-author so for me this is when I found this recently I was quite not say excited but it explained to me some kind of draw that Vladimir gave did on the blackboard and on the paper because he was really trying to apply very advanced method from mathematics to understand the physics of the phase transition by the use of of these diagrams and even at the teaching level we were exchanging about this point so this is a point which is very important because then more specifically Vladimir was working on the Landau theory of phase transition at that time and this is something as I told you that you represent a kind of backbone of all his research so after that when he moved to to Amiens he started to work intensively in liquid crystal and quasi crystals and of course he was working on the theory of structure of liquid crystal and phase transition and here you have some publications on this topic he did also a lot of work at that time in this remind to me when I was in some difficult period of my career he was telling me remember that there is there are periods in which you have to produce a very strong effort it's only you that can do it and he was explained to me what was his experience when he left Russia to move to France and then to get adapted to a new world and to work on different topics and in doing this he did a lot of work also with the experimentalist so he was a pure theorist but he was also very open to discuss with the experimentalist and this is key also for the rest of his career after that when he moved to Montpellier well there was this approach to very fundamental systems in biology and here you have the let's say the chapter of the study of DNA crystalline phases and the nucleosome so this assemblies of DNA and nucleosomic particle in the genome that regulate actually the structure of the genome genome and here you can see some relevant relevant contribution and inspired also by experimental facts like cryo electron microscopy produced by a nucleosomic particle produced by Franz Fazlivalon and as you can see here Rudy was very strongly involved in in this kind of topics and from this work these were produced this phase of the chromatin fiber I show you before so here there is a very interesting attempt by by Vladimir and his collaborator to try to describe this kind of assemblies in terms of soft matter systems and no more as a kind of macroscopic solid complexes at that time there was a lot of modeling at the molecular level but Vladimir was convinced that these phases were also the product actually of very low energy mode and the fluctuation of the system and somehow should be this kind of phases should be related to the intrinsic properties of symmetries of this molecular object a very important chapter that concerned this conference was developed just a few years after and here you you find that that I mean this fundamental contribution in physical virology about this new way to describe viral capsid and generalizing the theory of Caspar and Klu this was a work that developed mostly with Sergei Rochelle that is a historical collaborator Vladimir and what to say I think later there will be there will be talks on this subject I think that this is a very very beautiful illustration of I was Vladimir thinking about these systems and of course the physics behind that is is still is always highly nutrivial then in parallel Vladimir was also trying to break some paradigm in other field so the first example I provide to you is the theory of structural structured membranes and protein membrane interactions I think this is a very important paper because somehow Vladimir when he wants to to describe the viscoelastic fluctuation of a of a vesicle decorated with the cytoskeleton so something which is not only a lipid membrane but it's something that looks much more like a real cell he tried to describe this not with the standard language of people describing lipid membrane with the theory of cana madfresh but to use something which is very specific of the russian school of mechanics meaning the mechanics of thin solid shells and of course there were also other scientists that were developing this that at the time but by doing that he he showed very interesting features and somehow in also in this example but I mean also in in this paper yeah viscoelastic dynamics of I know sorry this one cytoskeleton influence on normal entangled fluctuation mode in the red blood cells he was able to explain contradiction contradiction contra dictionary experimental facts somehow he was able to show that the physics of a membrane together with the cytoskeleton cortical cytoskeleton is much more similar to the physics of a solid system than is just a lipid membrane which is always considered something as liquid ensemble of lipid molecules I will focus on this example because this is a very nice example in which also biology got a very important contribution from from theoretical physics this is a red blood cell that is invaded by parasite of malaria and here is described the sequence of the egress of this parasite from the red blood cell this was an experiment performing in my biology lab and and they could use a high speed camera to understand what was the mechanism and this mechanism is composed by three phases the first the formation of a pore by the parasite and then the parasite can escape from the red blood cells by using two mechanical instabilities the first is a curling instability that was described theoretically by Vladimir and Andrew color Jones at that time and then in the final part the parasite that you are in large number inside the red blood cells they somehow ejected in the viscous medium of the blood by a buckling instability like a solid object this mechanical effect is fundamental for the parasite why because the parasite can survive very short time in the blood the plasma it needs to attach to another red blood cells and then invade it again and this is the mechanism by which malaria is very dangerous right so it was very interesting to discover that the physics the mechanics of red blood cells and this still a very it's an ongoing topics in Montpellier but the mechanics of the red blood cells is fundamental for such kind of biological process and of course this all has also implication in from the point of view of therapies because if you can work on such kind of mechanism you can make red blood cells different with different chemical composition then you can you can expect also to reduce the effect of the spreading of this parasite inside the blood the other example and this is also a conventional system in which the theory of Vladimir and Sergei was very important also from the biological point of view is example of the study of the apoptosis life and apoptosis in non-proliferative epithelia so this is a topic that concern a creature that i'm going to show you in this slide is psionantestinalis it's essentially digestive tube that lives in the water but it's a very important as a model system for biologists because first of all from the evolutionary point of view is a system that is between the vertebrate and invertebrate in in the development of organism it's a system for which we know exactly the genome and of course all developmental biologists they they work on it they are quite curious system because from they have a descendant development because in the from the egg which is represented by this ensemble of cells there is a tadpole that escape but this tadpole does not develop as a normal organism but yeah it has a kind of regression and it becomes just the digestive tube that then fix on the on the on some rocks or the bottom of the sea so here you have a picture of this egg and then this you have a very white elaborate tissue you have follicular cells you have a cells that as a nucleus here there is another cells here that is at the base and then you have an epithelial tissue inside in which essentially for each cell at the surface you have 20 cells just below and these cells that can communicate they can exchange material as you can see here the symmetry is very similar to the object that Vladimir started to work on the same time which are viruses and they cause aedral viruses and so it was very interesting the the fact that they him and and Sergei they could elaborate knowledge from this system starting from what they did on solid viral capside capsids and here of course the physics is different because cells here are soft objects but of course by using property of symmetries and counting counting seriously the position of the nuclei of these cells and studying the intersection they could understand also by using statistical methods they could understand that the organization of these cells was not kind of casual one it was reproduced systematically in each egg and this organization was peculiar for the life of the organism why because actually the cells here at the base of this follicle they send an apoptotic message they die and they send an apoptotic message to kill all the cells below by this apoptosis the eggs open and the tadpole can get out if this sequence of messages cannot occur the organisms cannot leave so this was interesting because they provide an important contribution because they could verify that by by by studying the system they could verify that the signal was controlled by this cell here at the base of the follicle to to control the development of of this of this tissue and from that there was the development of a theory of apoptotic controllers which is of course very important from the biological point of view because people are thinking about the possibility that for example not only in developmental biology but also in cancer there could be cells that play a very key role in controlling the destiny and the fate of the surrounding cells if you can control these cells you can also have a way to control the development of the cancer so this contribution as you see they oblige to do some physical work some physics work sorry to discuss a lot with biologists but they are relevant contribution not only from the physical point of view but also from the biological one let me finish about recent work that we developed in Montpellier and here are all the expertise about protein assemblies in genome by Vladimir was very fundamental and we are missing a lot about this but nevertheless we we can accomplish interesting results this is a completely different problem we want to understand how the genome of a bacteria is divided and what is the mechanism which is a non-equilibrium mechanism allow the bacterium to segregate the two copies of the genome and not only segregate but also to position at the right place these genomes inside the bacteria so here you have an illustration of of this event of course this is very important also for application because if you manage to you don't see it so maybe I have to so you it's very important because people are thinking also to control the bacterial division by by developing new kind of antibiotics so you can see this this event that is reproduced very systematically and with Vladimir we could develop a model that reproduce well these kind of features concluding and I hope that I gave you some perspective of what was what has been the work by Vladimir and then you can understand how he could develop ideas that brought us to this beautiful pictures but particularly to these beautiful ideas on which we have to work on along with the time in the in the future but I would like to end this this presentation by making also very important point about Vladimir attitude towards science because Vladimir was not only a good teacher to physicists but was also somebody who was extremely open to discuss about all science and all cultural issue it was a fan of geography and history and and so I think that the best way to define Vladimir is that he was a humanist in the sense of the renaissance Italian renaissance if you let me say this so I leave you with the with the sentence that was sent to us by a colleague from the engineering robotics department that share with Vladimir councils in in the in the department of our science let's say and David Giraud wrote to us and saying a friend who taught us to love the beauty of physics and nature by the kindness of his personality but also by the firmness in the science in you perfectly I think this resumed very well Vladimir so thank you very much