Report of the XIV SBPMat Meeting: plenary lectures with their files, memorial lecture, symposia, awards…

OPENING CEREMONY

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.

At the opening table, from the readers´ left: Prof. Rodrigo Martins (Portugal, E-MRS immediate past president and IUMRS officer), Prof. Fernando Lázaro Freire Junior (Brazil, chair of the event), Prof. Marco Cremona (Brazil, chair of the event), Prof. Roberto Mendonça Faria (Brazil, SBPMat president), and Prof. Robert Chang (USA, IUMRS general secretary).

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

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.

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Edgar Zanotto.

Edgar Zanotto.

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.

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Paul Ducheyne. Biomaterials. Merging Materials Science with Biology.

Paul Ducheyne.

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.

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Ulrike Diebold. Surfaces of Metal Oxides.
Ulrike Diebold.

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.

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George Malliaras.
George Malliaras.

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.

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Ichiro Takeuchi. Combinatorial Approach to Materials Discovery.

Ichiro Takeuchi.

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.

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Claudia Draxl. On the Search of Novel Materials: Insight and Discovery though sharing of big data.
Claudia Draxl.

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.

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SYMPOSIA SESSIONS

Some of the symposia coordinators with the meeting chairs and the SBPMat president.

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.

View of the first poster session.

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EXHIBITION

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.

Coffee break and exhibition.

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CLOSING AND AWARDS CEREMONY

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.

Announcement of the students who won the Bernhard Gross Award.

See list of the awards winners.

Interviews with plenary speakers of the XIV SBPMat Meeting: George Malliaras.

Advances in understanding brain activity and in the diagnosis and treatment of neurological diseases such as epilepsy and Parkinson’s may arise with the help of Materials Science and Engineering. More precisely, of organic electronics.  In fact, organic materials with electronic properties are great interfaces between the signals sent by the brain and the outside, whether to study the brain or to interact with it.

The subject will be addressed in a plenary talk during the XIV SBPMat Meeting, given by Professor George Malliaras, head of the Department of Bioelectronics at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Saint-Étienne, where physicists, material engineers, electronic engineers, biologists and neuroscientists work together.

Malliaras graduated in Physics in 1991 from Aristotle University (Greece). After that, he entered the doctoral program in Mathematics and Physical Sciences at the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands. His thesis on photorefractivity in polymers earned him a distinction in the university (cum laude). After receiving his Doctoral degree, defended in 1995, he moved away to the United States. For two years, he held a postdoctoral fellowship at the IBM Almaden Research Center, to then become a Professor of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Cornell University, in New York. From 2006 to 2009, he worked as head of a national laboratory linked to the university, the Cornell NanoScale Science & Technology Facility.  In 2009, he founded the company Orthogonal, which operates in the field of organic electronics. In the same year, he returned to Europe as Professor of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Saint-Étienne, where he remains to this day.

Malliaras, whose h-index is 64, according to Google Scholar, has authored over 200 scientific papers, with more than 13,000 citations. His work with organic electronics and bioelectronics has received awards from the New York Academy of Sciences, U.S. National Science Foundation and the company DuPont, to name a few entities. He has given over 230 invited lectures and organized several events, for instance, the 2015 MRS Fall Meeting, in which he served as Meeting Chair.

He is a member of scientific boards in research centers in Germany, Ireland and Sweden. He is also an associate editor of Science Advances, an open access, peer-reviewed journal, released this year by the AAAS, which also publishes Science.

In his plenary talk at the XIV SBPMat Meeting, the scientist will address devices based on organic materials with electronic properties, bringing examples and opportunities.

What follows is a mini-interview with this plenary speaker of the XIV SBPMat Meeting.

Conducting polymer transistor array placed on rat cortex.

SBPMat newsletter: – In your opinion, what are your most significant contributions in the field of organic electronics/bioelectronics? Please explain them, very briefly, and share references from the resulting articles or books, or comment if these studies have produced patents, products, spin-off companies etc.

George Malliaras: – In the field of organic electronics it would be the co-development, together with Chris Ober at Cornell University, of orthogonal lithography. This is a set of processes that allows the microscale patterning of organic films using photolithography, the golden standard in microelectronics. Orthogonal lithography relies on the use of fluorinated photoresists that do not damage organic films. It allows the microfabrication of devices, including high resolution displays, using standard equipment that already exists in industry. There is a company (Orthogonal, Inc.,www.orthogonalinc.com) that has commercialized the photoresists and is pursuing commercialization of this technology. In bioelectronics, the work is too recent and I would have to wait for the benefit of hindsight. A trend that was emerging when I joined the field involved a transition from the use of organic coatings to the use of organic devices. The latter undoubtedly offer more capabilities to the interface with biology. My group is contributing to this trend by demonstrating that organic electrochemical transistors bring several benefits as transducers of biological phenomena, such as large amplification which enables high quality recordings of brain activity.

References:

  • J. Rivnay, R.M. Owens, and G.G. Malliaras, “The rise of organic bioelectronics”, Chem. Mater. 26, 679 (2014).
  • D. Khodagholy, T. Doublet, P. Quilichini, M. Gurfinkel, P. Leleux, A. Ghestem, E. Ismailova, T. Herve, S. Sanaur, C. Bernard, and G.G. Malliaras, “In vivo recordings of brain activity using organic transistors” Nature Comm. 4, 1575 (2013).
  • J. Rivnay, P. Leleux, M. Ferro, M. Sessolo, A. Williamson, D.A. Koutsouras, D. Khodagholy, M. Ramuz, X. Strakosas, R.M. Owens, C. Benar, J.-M. Badier, C. Bernard, and G.G. Malliaras, “High Performance Transistors for Bioelectronics Through Tuning of Channel Thickness”, Sci. Adv. 1, e1400251 (2015).
Ultra-conformable microelectrode array for electrocorticography.

SBPMat newsletter: – Which are, in your opinion, the main challenges for materials scientists and engineers about organic electronics interfacing with the brain?

George Malliaras: – To find the right collaborator who helps them formulate the right questions. I believe that embarking on an interdisciplinary field alone is a recipe for producing low impact work. The key to high impact work in this field is to formulate questions that are interesting to both neuroscientists and to us materials scientists and engineers. From our end, we need to be able to elaborate what are the advantages that organics offer and then figure out how to best employ them to address specific problems neuroscientists face. In my experience, it is often a combination of advantages (mixed conductivity, biocompatibility, “soft” mechanical properties) rather than a single one that gives the advantage to organics.

SBPMat newsletter: – If you wish, leave a message or an invitation to your plenary talk to the readers who will attend the XIV SBPMat Meeting.

George Malliaras: – I often quote a statement by Tadahiro Sekimoto, former president of Nippon Electric Corporation: “those who dominate materials, dominate technology”. It highlights the importance of materials research in our world and shows the dangers of moving to a “service” economy.

 

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Prof. George Malliaras´ bio and abstract of his plenary lecture.