Postscript

POSTSCRIPT

CONTENTS

The 2007 Materials Research Society (MRS) Fall Meeting concluded in Boston on November 30. It was a very successful meeting as evidenced by the strong attendence, excellent technical program, and the various events and activities through the week. We hope you enjoyed receiving and reading the Meeting Scene e-mails from Boston. Our special thanks to the sponsors of Meeting Scene. Please feel free to let us know if you have any comments or suggestions.

    
    2007 Fall Meeting Chairs celebrate a successful meeting

SCIENCE AS ART COMPETITION WINNERS

This was the first time that the popular Science as Art competition was held at an MRS Fall Meeting. Three first place and three second place winners were selected from the various entries. These images will be available soon on the "MRS Desktop Images" page on the MRS website.

First Place Winners

 
Fanny Beron (École Polytechnique de Montréal, Montréal, Canada)
Nano-Explosions
Color-enhanced scanning electron micrograph of an overflowed electrodeposited magnetic nanowire array (CoFeB), where the template has been subsequently completely etched. It’s a reminder that nanoscale research can have unpredicted consequences at a high level.

 
Oliver Gutfleisch (IFW Dresden, Institute of Metallic Materials, Dresden, Germany)
Bamboos for Vibration Control
Ni-Mn-Ga melt-extracted fibers with an approximate diameter of 100 µm showing a bamboo-type structure (imaged with a backscattered electron detector in an FEG-SEM). Melt-extraction is a unique and novel method to prepare single-crystalline particles for magnetic shape memory composites.

 
Timothy Leong(The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA)
Dirty Dice
Self-assembled 200 micron size nickel dice, imaged using scanning electron microscopy in the lower secondary electron (LEI) mode. The dice were colorized using Adobe Photoshop.

Second Place Winners

 
Olga Volobujeva (Tallinn University of Technology, Tallinn, Estonia)
Beauty of Nature
SEM image of CuInSe₂ film with Cu₂Se (plates) and InSe (needles) crystals on the surface.

 
Siddhartha Pathak (Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA)
Layered steps in Lanthanum Cobaltite
The picture shows a colored image of the layered steps formed inside closed pores of La_0.8Ca_0.2CoO₃, which were revealed due to fracture of the material.

 
Sieu Ha (Princeton University, Princeton, USA)
Red Planet
Combined 3-D representation of two images taken by scanning tunneling microscopy. The land is from an STM image of one monolayer of HATNA deposited on Au(111), and the sky is from an image of THAP/Au(111) exposed to a high background pressure of cobaltocene.

2007 MRS CHAPTER CALENDAR CHALLENGE

The winning team for the 2007 MRS Chapter Calendar Challenge was announced at the Chapters Luncheon on Wednesday afternoon. And the winning Chapter is the Purdue University MRS Chapter! They created a table-top calendar for 2008 with a materials-related image for each month. Congratulations to the Purdue University Chapter!

REVIEW OF THE MEETING

One of the dominant themes of the 2007 Fall Meeting was energy. The Meeting started on Sunday with seven well-attended tutorial sessions. Monday was designated as Energy Day at the meeting. The plenary session was held on Monday attracting a packed audience to hear Nobel Laureate Stephen Chu talk about solutions to the world's energy crisis. Also, on Monday, Nobel Laureate Sir Harold Kroto presented the first Fred Kavli Distinguished Lecture in Nanoscience on Nanoscience, Society and Sustainability in his inimitable style. One of the messages of his talk was the importance of involving and educating young people. This sentiment was reflected in other Energy Day activities including the fuel cell model car challenge and a science fair both involving local Boston-area high school students.

On Tuesday, and excellent David Turnbull Lecture was presented by Ramamoorthy Ramesh (Univ. California, Berkeley) on Oxide Electronics. This was a notable year for the MRS David Turnbull Lectureship because David Turnbull passed away earlier in the year. At the beginning of this session, Mike Aziz (Harvard Univ.) presented a very moving tribute to Turnbull. The first MRS President's Forum was also held on Tuesday, and the speaker was Bill Joy, a founder of Sun Microelectronics and inventor of several important computing technologies. He specifically spoke on the climate crisis and the use of innovative materials technologies and processes to this end. The first symposium X talk, aimed at the non-specialist, was held on Tuesday on Materials Challenges in Nanoelectronics. Informative National Science Foundation (NSF) and Department of Energy (US-DOE) funding seminars were held in the evening.

The major function on Wednesday was the awards ceremony in the evening. The graduate student awards were announced and presented. This was also the venue where the Turnbull Lectureship, the MRS Medal and the von Hippel award were presented to the respective recipients. This was followed by the von Hippel lecture presented by William Nix (Stanford Univ.) who is the von Hippel award recipient for this year. Nix's wonderful teaching skills were on full display as he discussed five specific cases wherein the lessons learned from studies conducted decades earlier were applicable to present-day research problems. Earlier in the day on Wednesday, Omar Yaghi (Univ. California, Los Angeles), recipient of the 2007 MRS Medal presented his medalist lecture discussing his work on, and the tremedous potential of, metal-organic frameworks particularly with relevance to energy applications. Other activities on Wednesday included the hands-on nano-art demonstrations during the day, and the education showcase outreach activities in the evening. Also the Women in Materials Science and Engineering Breakfast was held on Wednesday morning, with participants discussing how MRS is doing in terms of involving women in the Society's various activities. Also on Wednesday, James J. Collins from the Center for BioDynamics at Boston University discussed the fascinating area of Synthetic Biology.

The third and final Symposium X talk on renewable energy by Jeffrey S. Nelson (Sandia National Lab) was held on Thursday. This was also the day of the fourth and final poster session of the meeting. Poster awards were announced and awarded at each of the four poster sessions in the week. A Department of Defense funding seminar was held on Thursday evening. The conference ended on Friday with several symposia holding sessions on the last day. In addition to the events and activities described here, there were numerous other activities. These include the equipment exhibit held during the week, the Science as Art competition, the career center, advocacy and outreach activities. Over 5,000 people overall participated in various ways at the fall meeting.

POST-MEETING NOTES

SCENES FROM THE MEETING

© Materials Research Society, 2007