"This proposal represents the first concerted effort to study classical strongly coupled systems at the most fundamental individual-particle level, by using complementary approaches from different physics domains - complex plasmas and colloidal dispersions. These are complementary in many ways, the most important being that complex plasmas are virtually undamped at the particle timescales, whereas colloidal dispersions are overdamped and thus can be brought into equilibrium in a controlled way. Otherwise, both fields have similar advantages: Fully resolved 3D particle trajectories can easily be visualized, the pair interactions are tunable, and particles can be manipulated individually or collectively.The principal scientific aim is to study generic dynamical and self-organization processes at a detail not possible in the past. Scientific objectives include 1) particle dynamics of liquids, with the emphasis on mesoscopic processes in the supercooled state, e.g. dynamical heterogeneity, 2) phase transitions in solids, with particular attention on the evolutionary paths of crystal structure development and defect dynamics, 3) non-equilibrium phase transitions, with the focus on lane formation in driven binary systems and the dynamics at “atomistic” timescales, 4) phase separation in binary fluids, with the emphasis on the role of pair interactions in the demixing kinetics, as well as in the transition between spinodal decomposition and nucleation and growth regimes, 5) hydrodynamics at the discreteness limit, especially the onset and development of hydrodynamic instabilities at the particle scale, and 6) critical phenomena in particle systems with “designed” pair interactions, where the range and strength of attractive/repulsive parts can be tuned by external fields."