Third JUAMI connects US and African Fellows around sustainable energy materials in Uganda
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Third JUAMI connects US and African Fellows around sustainable energy materials in Uganda By Carlos Biaou and Julie Fornaciari
T
he Joint Undertaking for an African Materials Institute (JUAMI) embarked on its third school in Kampala, Uganda, this past December. For 13 days, scholars from across the United States and Africa came together to learn about sustainable energy materials, propose their own solutions to the problems, and engage in cultural exchange—both scientific and social. The program was developed in 2012 to provide opportunities for collaboration between American and East African scholars. This third school follows previous ones that took place in Arusha, Tanzania (2016) and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (2012). The JUAMI community continues to grow, and this year’s gender-balanced cohort was made up of 62 Fellows: 24 from the United States, 1 from Israel, and 37 from 10 different African countries. JUAMI incorporated many program components within the two weeks: a poster session; tutorials, which were paired with hands-on laboratories; research lectures designed to leverage the learning from the tutorials; and
a plenary lecture aimed at providing a broader context for JUAMI activities. The topics covered spanned from photovoltaics to flow cells to thermoelectrics, all focused on materials research being done in the area. The poster session featured research projects from all of the participants. Poster topics ranged from studies of polymer solar cells to investigations of structural and electronic properties of crystal structures, including Na2Ti3O7 and H2Ti3O7. With explicit instructions to include information about what expertise and capabilities participants could offer and what they were seeking, discussions about potential collaborations were encouraged. The seven tutorials, delivered by an international cohort of professors, covered the topics of (1) conducting polymers (Jiaxing Huang, Northwestern University); (2) batteries (Adrian Hightower, Metropolitan Water District of Southern California); (3) photovoltaics (David Cahen, Weizmann Institute); (4) flow cells and fuel cells (S.R. Narayan, University
The entire JUAMI 2018 cohort before the proposal presentations on the last day of the program.
of Southern California); (5) nanomaterials (Sara Skrabalak, Indiana University Bloomington); (6) electrolysis (Thomas Mallouk, The Pennsylvania State University); and (7) thermoelectrics (G. Jeffrey Snyder, Northwestern University). The associated laboratory activities gave students the opportunity to work together and have fun with science. The laboratories spanned from using an Arduino board to power a battery, to running a methanol fuel cell, to making nanoparticles using tea extract. Joshua Santana, a chemistry PhD candidate at Indiana University Bloomington, who served as the teaching assistant for the nanoparticle laboratory, noted that “many East African participants in the JUAMI program have not had the same access to laboratory equipment throughout their educational career.” Therefore, each experim
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