This summer I have had the opportunity to explore an area of research that was completely unfamiliar to me. My project studied forced colloids in nematic suspensions via Brownian Dynamics simulations. If this sounds totally confusing to you, then you are in the same boat I was in two months ago. Don’t worry, I’ll clue you in on some of the things I learned this summer. A nematic suspension refers to a group of particles that exhibit a particular alignment along an axis. In this case, the suspension models that of a nematic liquid crystal. Due to their ordering, liquid crystals are anisotropic, meaning that their properties are dependent on the direction in which they are measured.