At the 46th German Liquid Crystal Conference held in Paderborn, Sebastian Marino won the Poster Award for his poster presentation on Smectic Clusters in the Isotropic Phase of Ionic Liquid Crystals. Results of a comparative SAXS study was presented, which was aimed to elucidate the short-range order in the isotropic phases of ionic LCs. The analysis shows that in the isotropic phase up to 90 % of the ionic mesogens are organized in smectic clusters with correlation lengths in the order of 2 – 5 nm, which is considerably larger than the values found in the case of non-ionic LCs.