Françoise Brochard-Wyart is a theoretical physicist in soft matter physics and Professor at Sorbonne University and the Institut Curie, France. She studied at École Normale Supérieure de Cachan. After a PhD in Liquid Crystals under the supervision of Pierre-Gilles De Gennes, she studied polymer physics and wetting before moving to biophysics. She is a member of Institut Universitaire de France. She was awarded the Jean Ricard Prize from the French Physical Society in 1998.

Pierre Nassoy is an experimentalist physicist and a CNRS senior scientist at the Institut d'Optique d'Aquitaine in Bordeaux, France. He studied at Ecole Supérieure de Physique et Chimie Industrielles de Paris (ESPCI) and obtained an engineering diploma. He was junior CNRS scientist interested in cell biophysics at the Institut Curie until 2012.

Pierre-Henri Puech is an experimentalist (bio)physicist and an Inserm junior scientist at the Laboratoire Adhésion et Inflammation (LAI) in Marseille, France. He studied at Ecole Supérieure de Physique et Chimie Industrielles de Paris (ESPCI) and obtained an engineering diploma. His research interests center around cell biophysics, in particular in the context of mechanotransduction in T-cell recognition.

1.Introduction. 2. Soft Matter. 3. Phase Transitions. 4. Interfaces. 5. Liquid Crystals. 6. Surfactants. 7. Polymers. 8. Soft Matter in Everyday Life. 9. Soft Matter Technology. 10. Soft Matter in Biology. 11. Conclusion.