On September 26 of this year, during the closing of the XVIII B-MRS Meeting (Balneario Camboriu), Prof. Fernando Lázaro Freire Jr. (PUC-Rio) and Prof. André Avelino Pasa (UFSC) were honored for their contributions to B-MRS in especially for their volunteer work as scientific editors of the B-MRS Newsletter.
On the occasion of the presentation of the plaques that accompanied the honor, the president of B-MRS, professor Osvaldo Novais de Oliveira Junior, stated that the contributions of Professors Fernando Lázaro and André Pasa leave a legacy for B-MRS and an example to follow. “As president of B-MRS I wanted to express my gratitude to my colleagues and friends Fernando Lázaro and André Pasa for their volunteer work in communicating our society with its members and the general public. And for being always ready to assist B-MRS in the challenges that we have faced to make our society one of the most important in the country. ”
Professor Fernando Lázaro Freire Junior is a founding member of B-MRS. He was a member of the founding board, president of the Society from 2006 to 2009, scientific director from 2004 to 2005 and financial director from 2012 to 2013. He has served in the B-MRS Newsletter since the creation of this electronic vehicle in 2012.
Professor André Avelino Pasa was a scientific director of B-MRS from 2014 to 2015 and has been in the newsletter since 2014.
Professor Fernando Lázaro Freire Junior, a participatory member of SBPMat since its creation, took over as director of the Physics Department at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) in an inauguration ceremony held on May 31 of this year.
With an undergraduate degree, a master’s and doctorate in Physics from PUC-Rio, Freire Junior began teaching at that university in 1979. In 1985, he became an assistant professor and, in 2012, a full professor. From 2003 to 2008 he was director of the Physics Department of the university, a post he occupies again this year. Between 2011 and 2015, he served as director of the Brazilian Center for Research in Physics (CBPF).
In SBPMat, Fernando Lázaro Freire Junior was a member of the founding board (2001), scientific director from 2004 to 2005, president for two consecutive terms from 2006 to 2009 and financial director from 2012 to 2013, among other activities.
Sunday, September 27.By 6:45 pm. Hundreds of people enter the plenary room of the Convention Center “SulAmérica”, in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) for the opening ceremony of the 14th annual meeting of the Brazil Materials Research Society, whose acronym in Portuguese is SBPMat. The opening table is composed by the chairmen of the event, Prof. Marco Cremona (Brazil) and Prof. Fernando Lázaro Freire Junior (Brazil), as well as the present SBPMat president, Prof. Roberto Mendonça Faria (Brazil), the immediate past president of the European Materials Research Society (E-MRS), Prof. Rodrigo Martins (Portugal), and the general secretary of the International Union of Materials Research Societies (IUMRS), Prof. Robert Chang (USA). Behind them, a big banner shows the logos of dozens of institutions and companies that gave financial support to the event.
Near 1,000 attendants are present at the ceremony, which starts with the Brazilian national anthem. The chair Prof. Cremona welcomes the participants to the meeting. Prof. Robert Chang, who was president of MRS (Materials Research Society) in 1989 and founded IUMRS in 1991, convokes the participants of all countries to try to solve together the most important global challenges for materials research, related to health, food, environment, transport etc. Representing E-MRS, Prof. Martins, who presently takes care of Global Leadership and Service Award at IUMRS, emphasizes his desire of promoting international connections. Prof. Faria talks a little bit about Brazil, which, as well as other developing countries, is very rich in raw materials but needs to add value to its products by means of science and technology.
After the opening, Prof. Eloisa Biasotto Mano (Brazil) goes to the stage for the Memorial Lecture “Joaquim da Costa Ribeiro“, which is a distinction bestowed annually by SBPMat on a Brazilian researcher with outstanding career in the field of Materials. This 91-year-old scientist pursued international scientific education at a time when most women were illiterate in Brazil, and founded in the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) the first research group in polymers in the country. This group later became the Institute of Macromolecules (IMA), which was directed by Eloisa until she retired. In the memorial lecture, she talks about macromolecular materials and, using a representation of a polyethylene molecule made by herself with wire, she shows how these kind of molecules behave in response to their big size. A group of Prof. Eloisa´s disciples (among them, the present director of IMA) assists her with the presentation, showing affection, gratitude and admiration for her . After the talk, many attendants of diverse ages make a queue to take a picture with this protagonist of the dawn of polymer science in Brazil. Eloisa, who is professor emeritus of UFRJ, poses for all the pictures she is ask to. At the end of the photo session, she accepts our microphone and leaves a message for the young people starting a carreer in science:
Right after the memorial lecture, in the same venue, the participants enjoy the welcome cocktail while meeting friends and collaborators. The cocktail is animated by live “chorinho” music, an instrumental Brazilian popular genre original from Rio de Janeiro.
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PLENARY LECTURES
Nader Engheta
Monday, September 28.At 8:30 in the morning, the plenary room is full of attendants waiting to learn about metamaterials and the extreme behavior of waves interacting with them in the first plenary lecture of the event. The speaker is Nader Engheta, the H. Nedwill Ramsey Professor of Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania (United States). This Iranian-born scientist is a recognized world leader in research on metamaterials, and holds an H number of 69. Through experimental and theoretical research, Engheta and his collaborators have created such unconventional things as nanocircuits made of metamaterials that function as optical filters. Since the beginning of the talk, Engheta captivates the audience with some history of science and with a world of structures created by using particular composite metamaterials with particular sizes and geometries and arranged in particular ways with the aim of obtaining unconventional interaction with light and other waves.
In the afternoon, at 3:30, more than 400 people attend the second plenary lecture, which is about glass-ceramics (materials formed through controlled crystallization of certain glasses). The speaker is the Brazilian researcher Edgar Zanotto, Professor at the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar), in Brazil, where he founded and heads the Vitreous Materials Laboratory (LaMaV) that assembles a big international team. Zanotto, who is a world-renowned expert on glass-ceramics, presents in his lecture many useful applications of these materials, such as cooking hobs or artificial bones and teeth. He also mentions the scientists who, along 60 years of glass-ceramics history, contributed to the advancement of research on that topic. In spite of those contributions, the comprehension of some aspects of the formation of glass-ceramics is not complete, he says, but that is not a problem for glass-ceramics fabrication and applications. It´s just an opportunity for fundamental scientists.
Paul Ducheyne. Biomaterials. Merging Materials Science with Biology.
Tuesday, September 29.8:30 am, time for the third plenary lecture of the event. The lecturer, Prof. Paul Ducheyne, also comes from University of Pennsylvania (USA), where he directs a multidisciplinary center for bioactive materials and tissue engineering research. An authority on biomaterials field, Ducheyne is the editor in chief of a six-volume book on biomaterials published in 2011. In the talk, he shows a series of biomaterial-made devices, grafts, scaffolds etc., most of them already being commercialized, that actively interact with the body, either by promoting tissue formation (for example, bone) or by releasing drugs for diverse treatments. Ducheyne presents their effects on solving health problems, numbers about their markets, and scientific recent advances that can make them even more effective.
Some hours later, at 3:30 pm, hundreds of participants cluster again, this time around Prof. Ulrike Diebold, whose research group at UT Wien (Austria) is devoted to the understanding of fundamental mechanisms and processes occurring in surfaces at the atomic scale. Prof. Diebold catches the audience attention from the beginning to the end by showing, through scanning tunneling microscopy images, how she spies the behavior of atoms on the surface of metal oxides – topic in which she is a worldwide leader researcher. In particular, she reveals two secrets of metal oxide surfaces: the first one about how oxygen adsorbs on titanium dioxide and the second one about how active single metal atoms are in oxidation process in magnetite.
Wednesday, September 30. In the plenary lecture of the morning, the audience is transported again to the social-impacting world of biomaterials by Prof. George Malliaras, Greek-born, working at École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Saint-Étienne (France), where he heads the Department of Bioelectronics. Malliaras has an H index of 64. After many years working on organic electronics, he entered the new field of organic bioelectronics and obtained impacting results. His research is about electronic devices made of conducting polymers that match properties of living tissues. These devices are used for interfacing with human brain – a “natural electronic device”. The final purpose is to study brain activity or diagnose and even treat neurological diseases such as epilepsy. An example of device is a transistor that enables boosted in vivo recording of brain activity with low invasion. As suggestions for the materials community, Malliaras highlights the importance of collaboration with neuroscientists and physicians and the challenge of improving the understanding of electronic transport and structure.
Ichiro Takeuchi. Combinatorial Approach to Materials Discovery.
In the talk of the afternoon, the speed of science progress accelerates following the beat of the combinatorial approach. Prof. Ichiro Takeuchi, from University of Maryland (USA), explains how his group manages to optimize materials and properties discovery. As well as in lottery one can buy a big number of tickets to have more chances to win a prize, in materials discovery scientists can produce a huge number of combinations of elements to obtain a compound with desirable properties. For example, for quaternary compounds, millions of combinations are possible, from which only 0,01 % are known. In Prof. Takeuchi´s lab, machines for thin film deposition used with masks work night and day to create patchwork-like samples containing libraries of similar compounds. Then, the libraries are characterized by rapid tools, giving information about the properties of several compounds at the same time. Coupled with appropriate theory and computational simulations, these high-throughput experiments become real materials discovery engines.
Claudia Draxl. On the Search of Novel Materials: Insight and Discovery though sharing of big data.
Thursday, October 1st,8:30 am. In the last plenary lecture of the event, Prof. Claudia Draxl (Humboldt University, Germany) publicly wonders how to make available the huge amount of data resulting from experiments around the world, high-throughput screening, computer clusters etc. Why to do that with scientific data? For confirmation, broad dissemination in society, sharing with distant collaborators and reuse with new purposes. With that aim, Prof. Draxl and collaborators from European countries are facing the development of a repository of materials raw data, called Novel Materials Discovery (NoMaD), which hosts, organizes and shares materials data on the web.
The symposia at SBPMat annual meetings are selected from proposals that can be submitted to the event committee by any scientist from anywhere in the world. This edition of the event encompassed 26 symposia (including the satellite event “8th International Summit on Organic and Hybrid Solar Cells Stability”) and 2 workshops, and it registered symposia coordinators from Argentina, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Japan, Portugal, Spain, Swiss, USA, and, of course, Brazil. Within the symposia, near 190 invited speeches and more than 2,000 technical works are presented and discussed in oral and posters sessions, on a wide range of subjects going from carbon nanostructures to biomaterials, from characterization techniques to computer simulation, from materials for sustainable development to safe use of nanomaterials.
While some symposia have been held year after year in the SBPMat meeting, the University Chapters symposium was a novelty of this year meeting. It was completely organized by students from diverse points of Brazil who are coordinators of the SBPMat University Chapters. The chapters are organized teams, affiliated with the society, composed of graduate and undergraduate students working in materials field. The members of these groups carry out diverse activities that complement their academic education. The students from the existing chapters, which were eight in number up to the moment of the meeting, faced the challenge of organizing a symposium – a task that is usually done by senior researchers.
In fact, students have not only active but also massive participation in the XIV SBPMat meeting. Almost half of the attendants (950 people) were master, doctoral and even undergraduate students doing research on materials field. In Brazil, the federal agency for research support, CNPq, has a program called “scientific initiation” that grants scholarships to undergraduate students to conduct research under the supervision of a Professor.
For the oral sessions of the symposia, all along the meeting, after the morning plenary session, and before and after the afternoon plenary talks, the attendants distributed themselves among 17 rooms. The poster sessions took place at the end of the afternoon from Monday to Wednesday and in the morning on Thursday. Walking through the long corridors of the poster sessions, one could see active scientific discussion, many times between a young author and a renowned researcher. One could also hear very positive comments about the original arrangement of the poster panels. The size of the poster session was impressive. In total, near 1,800 research works were presented in the posters.
Twice a day from Monday to Wednesday, the attendants could take a break and have a coffee with cookies while visiting the exhibition of the event, which encompassed 32 stands showing a variety of scientific instruments, services, scientific journals, books and opportunities for the materials community. In addition, on Wednesday, the participants had the opportunity to attend four hours of technical talks given by some expositors about fabrication and characterization techniques.
On Thursday by 12:30 the closing ceremony started. In the closing panel, Prof. Soo Wohn Lee, from MRS Korea and conference chair of the IUMRS-ICAM 2015, joined the representatives of SBPMat, E-MRS and IUMRS.
In his final remarks, the meeting chair Prof. Cremona presented some photos of the past days and hours that made the public remember so nice and fruitful moments. He also presented the numbers of the event: 2,000 registered people from 985 institutions, among which 300 were foreign researchers from 40 countries. Finally, he announced that the next SBPMat annual meeting will be held in Campinas city (São Paulo state).
After the closing words, more than 20 prizes were given to young researchers within four different awards: the Bernhard Gross Award, a traditional SBPMat recognition for the best works of students, and the awards bestowed by IUMRS, E-MRS and Horiba.
On May 6th, at the Naval School of Rio de Janeiro, the Brazilian Academy of Sciences (ABC)held the tenure ceremony of its new members, elected in a process of nomination and evaluation by their peers, performed throughout 2013. In the event, 24 scientists were assigned as full members of ABC. Among those, in the field of Physical Sciences, there was Professor Fernando Lázaro de Freire Junior, Materials researcher and former president of SBPMat.
Contemplating the ideia of being a researcher, Fernando Lázaro chose to graduate with a Bachelor’s degree in Physics by the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-RIO),earning it in 1978. In 1979, he started teaching in the same university, while attending his Master’s (1979-1981) and Doctorate (1981-1985) courses in Physics there. During his graduate studies, Fernando Lázaro made his first scientific interventions in the field of Materials by means of an ion accelerator, initially used by him for works in Atomic Physics. In 1998, he went to Università degli Studi di Padova (in Italy) for his Postdoctoral studies, working with materials surfaces and interfaces.
From 2003 to 2008, he was the Director of PUC-Rio’s Physics Department. From 2008 to 2012, he coordinated the field of Physics and Astronomy in the Research Foundation of the State of Rio de Janeiro (FAPERJ). In Europhysics Letters (a journal from the European Physical Society), Professor Lázaro worked as coeditor between 2006 and 2010, and advisory editor from 2010 to 2013. In SBPMat, he served two consecutive terms as president, two as scientific director and one as financial director.
Currently, Fernando Lázaro is a Full Professor in PUC-Rio and director of Centro the Brazilian Center for Research in Physics (CBPF), in addition to being a member of the FAPERJ’s Higher Board and coordinator of the National Institute of Surface Engineering. Author of over 170 scientific articles, with more than 2500 citations, he is a level 1A researcher in the Brazilian National Research Foundation, CNPq. Among his most relevant papers, there are several studies on carbon-based materials: DLC (diamond-like carbon) films, nanotubes and, more recently, graphene.
Following there is a brief interview with the researcher.
SBPMat newsletter: – Tell us a little about your history: what led you to become a scientist and work in the field of Materials?
Fernando Lázaro: – I always enjoyed Physics and Mathematics during high school, but in 1974 I had no ideia, when I applied for college entrance exams, that it was possible to do research in Brazil. Because of this, I took the exam to major in Electrical Engineering in PUC-Rio, and only there I realized that it was possible to perform researches in the field of Physics, in Brazil. Then, I transferred myself to the Bachelor’s in Physics, which was easier, as in 1975 PUC-Rio already had a common Basic Cycle for the whole of its Scientific and Technical Center. So, I didn’t waste any time. I was in my second year in the undergraduate studies. My graduate studies, then, still in PUC-Rio, were in Atomic Physics, using an ion accelerator as a working tool. As such accelerator was also a great tool to analyze materials, it was through this path that I entered into the field of Materials.
SBPMat newsletter- What do you consider as your main contributions to the field of Materials?
Fernando Lázaro: – My research has always been conducted in collaboration with several colleagues and students, and I think we made an important contribution to the study of nanostructured carbon films (diamond-like carbon films, DLC), as attested by the papers with a high number of citations and all the invitations to be invited lecturer in many international congresses. It is evident that supervising students has been important too, as well the management positions in PUC-Rio, CBPF and SBPMat.
SBPMat newsletter: – Choose some of your more highlighted papers, and comment on them, if possible.
Fernando Lázaro: – My most cited paper is an article in Applied Physics Letters, published in 1992, coauthored by Carlos Achete, from COPPE/UFRJ, and Dante Franceschini, currently at UFF, on the nitrogen incorporation in DLC films [Franceschini, D. F. ; Achete, C. A. ; Freire Junior, F. L. Internal Stress Reduction By Nitrogen Incorporation In Hard a-C:H Thin Films. Applied Physics Letters, New York, v. 60, p. 3229-3231, 1992]. It was released at the right time, and offered a relevant result for the issue of the applications of such materials, namely, the decrease of the internal tension of the film (an important factor in the debonding of films from the substrates), without a significant change in its hardness.
SBPMat newsletter: – In your opinion, what are the main challenges in your current research field for Materials Science and Engineering?
Fernando Lázaro: – I have been working with graphene and carbon nanotubes. For both, the production of good quality samples, in a controlled and profitable form, still represents a great obstacle for the use of those materials in a broader way than the one that has been verified up to this point.
SBPMat newsletter: – Send a message to our readers who are starting their careers as scientists.
Fernando Lázaro – An encouraging message. The material working conditions nowadays are much better than when I started, three decades ago; the same can be said about the wages in academia. So, things have improved and tend to keep getting better, and I think it is feasible to conduct good quality researches, with an international impact, in Brazil.
A Assembleia Geral da Academia Brasileira de Ciências (ABC) elegeu, no dia 18 de dezembro, 24 cientistas para integrar seus quadros como membros titulares.
Entre eles figura o diretor financeiro da nossa SBPMat, o professor Fernando Lázaro Freire Júnior (PUC-Rio), eleito na área de Ciências Físicas. O professor Fernando Lázaro foi presidente da SBPMat por dois mandatos consecutivos, de 2006 a 2009. Também foi membro da diretoria fundadora que conduziu a sociedade entre 2001 e 2003 e diretor científico de 2004 a 2005.
A ABC também elegeu, nesta oportunidade, um membro colaborador, seis membros correspondentes e 29 afiliados eleitos para o período 2014 – 2018.
Veja aqui notícia no site da ABC com a lista completa dos membros eleitos neste ano: