In celebration of the 65th birthday of Thanos Panagiotopoulos, a pioneer in the development of novel simulation algorithms for soft matter and complex fluids, I will discuss several new simulation and analysis methods and software tools my group has recently developed to aid in the study of self-assembly and crystallization. Examples include new metadynamics-centric algorithms for calculating free energy landscapes of complex particle systems that do not require the use of differentiable collective variables, and workflows for studying assembly and crystallization pathways that use automated change point detection [1] and local order parameter analysis.
