In common with the more established themes in condensed matter physics, the goal of soft matter research is to understand the collective behaviour of systems from the interaction of their parts. While crystalline solids and liquids seem to lend themselves to a straightforward classification of materials, soft matter is often viscoelastic and challenges our thinking about how different materials should be defined. Many such systems exhibit hierarchical structures organized on multiple length-scales, which emerge from molecular and supra-molecular self-assembly. Ongoing work in this area focuses on the measurement of structural and dynamical properties of biopolymer assemblies and the modeling of their resultant macroscopic properties.