MRS FALL 14 BY THE NUMBERS

Dear Blog Readers,

That is the end of one more Fall Meeting and here are some of the numbers of this outstanding meeting:

• Over 250 exhibitors at Exhibition
• More than 3,300 oral presentations
• Nearly 3,000 poster presentations
• 52 simposia
• 10 tutorials
• 1 new award, honoring post-doctoral researchers
• 24 institutional participants at the first iMatSci
• 18 MRS Graduate Student Silver Award Winners
• 7 MRS Graduate Student Gold Award Winners
• 4 winner MRS Chapters at Sustainability @ My School Poster Competition

I hope you all enjoyed it!

Best regards,

Monca

MRS FALL 14 MEETING @ MRS ON DEMAND

Dear Blog Reader,

For those that could not attend this year’s Fall Meeting, stay tunned for the next MRS OnDemand by visiting: www.mrs.org/on-demand

Also trough MRS OnDemand, join the Webinar Wednesdays (www.mrs.org/webinars):

January 21 – In-situ transmission electron microscopy

February 25 – 3D Printing of Biomaterials

March 25 – 3D Integrated Circuits Materials Challenges

April 22 – Multiscale Mechanics of Biological, Biomedical and Biologically inspired Materials

May 20 – Power Electronics with Wide Bandgap Materials

June 24 – Biomineralization

July 22 – 2D Transition Metal Dichalcogenide

Meeting Attendees and MRS members receive FREE access to the 2014 Fall Meeting OnDemand content.

Go to www.prolibraries.com/mrs and click on my library to access your content.

The OnDemand library includes: select talks from technical seminars, Kavli lectures and Award talks, plenary session, select tutorial sessions. To access your content, log in with your MRS username and password.

EXTERNAL RECOGNITION FOR MRS AWARDS

Dear Blog Reader,

During this Fall Meeting I learnt that from the 5 top awards in the field of Materials Science and Engineering, 4 of those are from MRS:

1. Von Hippel Award (MRS)

2. David Turnbull Lectureship (MRS)

3. MRS Medal (MRS)

4. Outstanding Young Investigator Award (MRS)

5. Nadai Medal (ASME)

During this Fall Meeting MRS announced their intention to reach a more balanced recognition of its members, with more females and non-US nominations. For instance about 11% of awardees are non-US, whilst about 47% of members are non-US).

If you have any suggestions about how to help change this scenario, send your comments to Lorri Smiley.

MATERIALS RESEARCH SOCIETY FOUNDATION

Dear Blog readers,

For those who have not heard about it, the Materials Research Foundation operates as a program of the MRS to help on funding resources for a wide range of innovative grassroots and member-driven initiatives, with focus on education, outreach and peer recognition.

Coming soon – new grant cycle: Submit your grant proposal by 1^st February 2015.

Grants will be announced at the 2015 MRS Spring Meeting

More details: www.mrs.org/foundation

LAST DAY OF MRS FALL 14 MEETING

Dear Blog readers,

At the last day of MRS Fall Meeting, the symposiums B (Multifunctional Polymeric and Hybrid Materials) and K (Graphene and GrapheneNanocomposites) were the ones that got my attention. The symposium B today was characterized by interesting seminars about self-assembly, about variationsin microtopography by temperature-memory effect and about magneto-sensitive shape-memory nanocomposites. At symposium K seminars about in-situ characterizations and about sensors got my attention.

Final blog--Fall 2014 MRS

Well, good evening everyone.

I hope you have all had safe travels as you've gone back to your respective homes. After 13+ hours of traveling my lab members and I finally arrived back to the University of North Carolina.

The Fall 2014 MRS Meeting was my first conference experience, and I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed it. Initially, it was a bit overwhelming when faced with all of the possibilities that lay before me when I registered early on Monday morning. However, I soon got the hang of it and by Tuesday was able to navigate with ease through the plethora of sessions.

One of my favorite parts of the MRS meeting was learning from so many other researchers in my field. Putting a face to the names that I so often read about really helped to personalize each article and encouraged me to continue to work hard on my own projects!

In addition, I gained a wealth of knowledge that otherwise would have taken weeks or months to attain by my own personal study. The insight provided by lead researchers in the field of 2D materials is invaluable.

I hope the rest of you had similar experiences throughout the week. Don't forget about MRS OnDemand, where you will have access to many of the talks from the Fall 2014 MRS meeting. 

The blogging stops now, but feel free to continue the conversation with me over twitter! I'd love to hear from you.

Best,

Tyler

@Farnsworthtw

LOOKING FOR PROACTIVE INTERNATIONAL MEMBERS

Dear All,

 

The International Subcommittee continues its efforts and networking to get more people engaged! This Fall Meeting we went at different events to engage more people to join us. And among such events we joined the Student Mixer, Leadership Breakfast, Poster Session Chapters Luncheon and the International Reception.

Did you know that almost half of the MRS members are non-US? According to the demographics presented during the Leadership Breakfast, we are about 47% non-US members. Since we are talking about international members, other demographics shared at that meeting is that only 19% of the nominations for MRS awards are non-US members and 11% of the total winners are non-US members. Thus “when nominating a colleague for MRS award, think broadly and globally” as said Orlando Auciello.

Did you know this subcommittee focus is to promote international members concerns?

For instance, this year the subcommittee focused into 3 main activities: International University Chapters task force; Web database for exchange and cooperation programs as well as sustainable related topics (a worldwide concern, something that affects all); and virtual activities as a way to engage international members to MRS.

If you are a non-US member and wants to get more involved at MRS, do not hesitate to contact me with suggestions or to join us in our efforts!

ENGINEERS AS WORLD CHANGERS

Dear Blog Readers,

Sometimes people can get quite narrow-minded once focus their own work (and evaluate others) only at their scientific aspect and forget about their potential social impact.

This Fall Meeting at the Impact of Materials on Society subcommittee booth I was happy to see that this subcommittee partenered with the University of Florida to enable materials science and engineering students a more broad education view so to understand how engineers can impact in a "global, economic, environmental and societal context" trough a pilot-based program at the undergraduate level.

For more information about this program contact: Kevin Jones or Pamela Hupp.

It is great to see that they started to realize the importance to consider the people as a whole, without separation between humanistic and scientific fields. I here want to congratulate this subcommittee for this step towards the advancement of interdisciplinary materials research and technology by contributing to more wholistic individuals that will likely give more impactful results in the society.

As an engineer and researcher, I feel responsible not only to contribute for technologies/research that could improve the quality of life, but also to educate the society about the importance of engineering. Once a society learns to value their researchers and engineers, advancements in quality of life are benefited.

Until...tomorrow

Hello All!

It's been so great sharing with you my thoughts and other details about this past week during the 2014 Fall MRS meeting! I'm very grateful for this opportunity, both blogging as well as tweeting about the many happenings of the conference. It's been great to share the meeting with you all via twitter and I hope to stay in contact with many of you as the years go by! 

Stay tuned for my final post tomorrow, where I will try to summarize my overall conference experience and solicit feedback from your thoughts as well.

Cheers,

Tyler

Photos from Fall 2014 MRS

There are some great photos of this week on the MRS facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/materials.research.society/photos_stream if you are interested in viewing them! See if you can spot yourself or your friends in the pictures!

Let me know if you have other pictures from the meeting, or post them on twitter with the hashtag #f14mrs or tweet them at me, @farnsworthtw or @materials_mrs.

I know you have got to have taken some pictures at some point in time over the week so let's see them!!

Tyler