Please contact the symposium organizers with questions.

Membranes have emerged as a critical element in solving societally important problems, such as CO₂ capture, water purification, fuel cells, and batteries, where understanding and controlling the transport of small molecules (gas, water, and ions) in the membranes are the core to enable the technologies. The increasing level of synthetic control over chemical functions and multidimensional structures of polymers, inorganic materials, and hybrids enables the design of next-generation devices with unprecedented multifunctionality and high performance. In the past decade, there has been tremendous interest in developing structure/property relationship, which is used to guide the development of high-performance materials with new chemistry and nanostructures.

This symposium will provide a platform to bring together membrane practitioners at the cutting edge of new membranes development and application (who may not have extensive experience in materials synthesis and characterization) with materials chemists and physics (who make and characterize new functional materials but have little membranes experience). This forum aims to give an opportunity for sharing new materials ideas and membrane needs/possibilities, that serves to catalyze new collaborations and enable development of next-generation membranes for practical applications.

Abstracts on both fundamental and applied aspects of the modeling, synthesis, self-assembly, and characterization of polymers, inorganic materials, and hierarchically nanostructured inorganic/polymer hybrids, and their application involved with the transport of small molecules including energy-efficient gas separation and water purification, fuel cells, batteries, and supercapacitors, are encouraged.

Topics will include:

• Design, synthesis, and self-assembly of polymeric membranes (e.g., block/multi-block copolymers, nanostructured polymers), inorganic membranes (e.g., zeolites, MOFs, graphene/graphene oxide, 2D materials), and hybrids.
• Fabrication and patterning of membranes with unique properties
• Theoretical modeling (e.g., structure-property-performance relationship studies) and advanced characterization (e.g., structural/physical characteristic studies) of membrane materials
• Membranes for CO2 capture, water purification and wastewater treatment, and other energy-intensive molecular separations
• Membranes for energy storage devices and systems (e.g., batteries, supercapacitors and their hybrids), and energy conversion devices (e.g., fuel cells)

Invited Speakers:

• Baoxia Mi (University of California, Berkeley, USA)
• Sanat Kumar (Columbia University, USA)
• Yushan Yan (University of Delaware, USA)
• Chulsung Bae (Rensselaer Polytechnic University, USA)
• Thomas Epps (Univ Delaware, USA)
• Viatcheslav Freger (Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, Israel)
• Geoff Geise (Univ Virginia, USA)
• Douglas Gin (University of Colorado Boulder, USA)
• Michael Hickner (Penn State Univ, USA)
• Andrew Livingston (Imperial College London, United Kingdom)
• Tim Merkel (Membrane Technology and Research, Inc., USA)
• Sankar Nair (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA)
• Alexei Sokolov (Oak Ridge National Lab and Univ Tennessee, USA)
• Chris Stafford (NIST, USA)
• Zhengjin Yang (University of Science & Technology of China, China)

Symposium Organizers