2016 MRS Spring Meeting launches in Phoenix, Ariz.
- PDF / 860,206 Bytes
- 5 Pages / 585 x 783 pts Page_size
- 22 Downloads / 147 Views
2016 MRS SPRING MEETING RECAP
2016 MRS Spring Meeting launches in Phoenix, Ariz. www.mrs.org/spring2016
T
he Materials Research Society (MRS) held its Spring Meeting for the first time in Phoenix, Arizona, on March 28–April 1, with more than 4400 people in attendance and 145 exhibitors. The Meeting Chairs, Christopher A. Bower (X-Celeprint Ltd.), Andrew M. Minor (University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory), Roger Narayan (UNC/NCSU Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering), Izabela Szlufarska (University of Wisconsin– Madison), and Osamu Ueda (Kanazawa Institute of Technology), put together 62 symposia that comprised the technical core of the Meeting. They were grouped into six topic clusters: Characterization and Modeling of Materials; Energy and Environment; Electronics and Photonics; Materials Design; Nanotechnology; and Soft Materials and Biomaterials. Symposium presentations
Of the symposia at the Meeting, more than 15 were directly related to sustainability. Materials science plays an important role in the sustainable supply of energy, water, products, services, transportation, buildings, and
MRS BULLETIN
•
public infrastructure. The Energy and Environment Symposium encouraged an approach toward the role of materials science in sustainable development and provided a medium for technically based, interdisciplinary discussions. Topics included materials for alternative energy sources, materials designed for enhanced recyclability, and objective application of economic, sociological, and governmental models that enable materials research and technological developments. In a Soft Materials and Biomaterials Symposium talk, Koon Gee Neoh, from the National University of Singapore, discussed the devastating problem of bacterial biofilm formation on implanted medical devices, such as catheters. These bacteria can also harbor on hospital surfaces. Neoh has developed strategies to coat surfaces with antimicrobial materials using UV or heat-induced graft polymerization, thiol-linking, and cross-linking. She uses quaternized chitosan as a bactericidal material to kill adherent bacteria on hospital surfaces. The desired result is a reduction in the patients’ risk of infection during hospital stays. Andrew Minor discussed dramatic improvements in in situ transmission
electron microscopy (TEM) mechanical testing in a Characterization and Modeling of Materials Symposium presentation. The true value of TEM lies in studying structure and defects with high spatial resolution. Minor and his collaborators at the National Center for Electron Microscopy have developed a technique to locally capture strain during in situ mechanical testing. The basis of their work is the direct, rapid collection of 2D electron diffraction patterns from a nano-focused beam (nanobeam electron diffraction) at each point in a rasterscanned image. This is different from typical TEM experiments, as instead of choosing a bright- or dark-field imaging mode, all information is collected simultaneously and can be fil
Data Loading...
