The 2015 Materials Research Society (MRS) Spring Meeting will be held April 6–10, 2015, in San Francisco, Calif. The scientific sessions will include many new and developing areas of materials research as well as some well-established and popular topics. To complement the scientific sessions, tutorials will provide detailed introductions to particularly exciting areas of research, while the exhibit will showcase products of interest to the materials community. The technical meeting and exhibits will be located at the Moscone West Convention Center, San Francisco Marriott Marquis, and Westin San Francisco Market Street.
Making up the core of the Meeting are five topical clusters of the technical program, encompassing 51 symposia.
Energy will include symposia with a focus on emerging silicon technology, photovoltaics, perovskite solar cells, as well as next-generation electrochemical energy storage and conversion systems. Other areas covered include high-capacity anode materials for lithium-ion batteries, advances in solar water splitting, and the development of oxygen reduction reaction and evolution reaction materials in energy storage and conversion systems.
2015 MRS Spring Meeting Registration Rates
Nanomaterials will cover a wide range of topics, including bioinspired microscale- and nanoscale-machines, nanoscale heat transport, and emerging nongraphene 2D materials. Some symposia will explore the advances in mechanism-enabled design and syntheses of molecules to colloidal compound semiconductor nanocrystals. Other areas covered in this group include nanogenerators and piezotronics, photoactive nanoparticles and nanostructures, semiconductor nanowires and devices, and graphene and carbon nanotubes.
Some of the symposia in Electronics and Photonics will focus on the interplay of structure and carrier dynamics in energy-relevant nanomaterials. Other symposia will cover resonant optics, light-matter processes, plasmonics and metamaterials, and quantum photonics. Several symposia in this cluster will cover innovative interconnects/electrodes for advanced devices, reliability and materials issues of semiconductors, and novel materials for advanced optics and photonics.
Soft and Biomaterials will include sessions on the foundations of bio/nano interfaces, supramolecular materials, organic bioelectronics, and soft electronics. In addition, there are symposia in this cluster dedicated to exploiting bioinspired self-assembly for the design of functional and responsive materials, nanomaterials in translational medicine, and crystal engineering.
The General—Fabrication and Characterization cluster will round out the meeting with symposia on recent advances in adaptive architecture and programmable matter, and applications in gold-based materials, oxide thin films and nanostructures, metal oxides, and titanium oxides. Other areas include multiscale modeling and experiments on microstructural evolution in nuclear materials and materials information using novel techniques in electron microscopy.
Symposium X—Frontiers of Materials Research will feature lunchtime lectures for the broad materials community on topics at the forefront of materials science and engineering research. Alexandra Navrotsky of the University of California–Davis, will present “Energetics at the Nanoscale: Impacts for Geochemistry, the Environment and Materials.” Lionel Vayssieres of the International Research Center for Renewable Energy will present “Advanced Low Cost Energy Materials from Aqueous Solutions.” Daniel Vanmaekelbergh from the University of Utrecht will present “Colloidal Nanocrystals: From Individual Quantum Objects to Building Blocks for Honeycomb Semiconductors Hosting Dirac Carriers.”
An awards ceremony will be held to honor this year’s Outstanding Young Investigator and MRS Fellows as well as the recipients of the Innovation in Materials Characterization Award—endowed by Toh-Ming Lu and Gwo-Ching Wang, the Mid-Career Research Award—endowed by Aldrich Materials Science, and the Gold and Silver Graduate Student Awards.
The Meeting will include a plenary address by Samuel I. Stupp, Board of Trustees Professor of Materials Science & Engineering, Chemistry, Medicine, and Biomedical Engineering and Director of the Simpson Querrey Institute for BioNanotechnology at Northwestern University. There will also be a presentation by the recipient of the Fred Kavli Distinquished Lectureship in Nanoscience, yet to be announced.
Poster sessions will be held in the Marriott Marquis on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday from 8:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. in the Yerba Buena Salon 7/8/9. The meeting chairs will sponsor a Best Poster Award competition, selecting recipients each night on the basis of the posters’ technical content, appearance, graphic excellence, and presentation quality.
The popular Science as Art competition will be again held at this Meeting. The competition is open to all registered meeting attendees, with entries to be on display in the Exhibit Hall in the Moscone West Convention Center. Multiple first-place and second-place awards of $400 and $200, respectively, will be presented at the Meeting. Guidelines and the deadline for entries will be available on the 2015 MRS Spring Meeting website.
MRS will host a Career Fair as an extension of its new online Career Central Job Board (jobs.mrs.org). The Career Fair will provide an opportunity for job seekers and employers to discuss career opportunities.
Graduate students and members of MRS University Chapters are invited to attend the student mixer reception. Also, chapter officers and faculty advisors are invited to attend a meeting of MRS University Chapter representatives to compare notes on recent activities and brainstorm on new projects and issues of common concern. Those interested in starting new chapters are welcome.
The Government Agency Presen-tations, which include presentations on funding opportunities from US and non-US agencies, and various events for professional development and public outreach are also planned.
Public outreach activities and professional development programs will include seminars and workshops for materials scientists for career development; hands-on activities during coffee breaks; NanoDays demonstrations; and information at the Public Outreach Center about the Society’s outreach programs and information seminars, including opportunities for MRS members to participate.
The deadline to pre-register for the MRS Spring Meeting is March 20, 2015 (5:00 p.m. EST). International travelers are reminded to begin the visa process early. For additional information on the Spring Meeting, contact MRS Member Services, Materials Research Society, 506 Keystone Drive, Warrendale, PA 15086-7573, USA; email info@mrs.org; and tel. 724-779-3003.
Details of various events and activities will be published in the Program & Exhibit Guide available on-site. The MRS website can be accessed for updated information on confirmed talks and details on special events, information on obtaining a visa, and pre-registration at www.mrs.org/spring2015.
