Please contact the symposium organizers with questions.

This symposium will broadly cover current and emerging thermal materials, with aspects bridging fundamental understanding of materials' thermal properties to applications. The symposium will focus on emerging materials and systems for solar thermal, thermophotovoltaic, thermoelectric, thermo-electrochemical, thermo-acoustic, thermo-ferroelectric, and thermo-magnetic energy harvesting, storage, and multiscale (from nano to macro) materials with extreme thermal conductivity for thermal management. Discussions include both the experimental and theoretical aspects, such as rational design, synthesis, fabrication processes, property optimization and external field control, modelling of material thermal properties, including new fundamental science breakthroughs.

Broad Impacts: This symposium will present state-of-the-art research on thermal materials, device, and theory for various applications, bringing together scientists and engineers from various disciplines and diverse backgrounds, as well as women and minority researchers. We will also coordinate a tutorial session on thermal materials to educate a more general MRS audience. Student awards will be organized to facilitate younger researcher participation in this symposium. The symposium will bring exciting opportunities in the education and training of the next generation of materials researchers, public outreach, career and professional development, impact of materials research on the global economies, and efforts to broaden diversity and inclusion of underrepresented groups.

Topics will include:

• Thermal energy storage materials
• Emerging high thermal conductivity materials
• Thermal interface materials and thermal boundary resistance
• Phononic, thermochromic, thermal-mechanical, and -acoustic metamaterials
• Advanced techniques for measurements of thermal properties
• Thermal management of electronics and photonics
• Thermoelectric and thermophotovoltaic energy conversion
• Radiative cooling and thermal radiation in the near-field or involving sub-wavelength objects such as metamaterials
• Modelling and simulations of thermal transport from atomic scale to micrometer scale
• Machine learning for phonon transport and thermal materials discovery

• A tutorial complementing this symposium is tentatively planned.

Invited Speakers:

• David Cahill (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA)
• Gang Chen (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)
• Renkun Chen (University of California, San Diego, USA)
• Chris Dames (University of California, Berkeley, USA)
• Timothy Fisher (University of California, Los Angeles, USA)
• Kenneth Goodson (Stanford University, USA)
• Samuel Graham (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA)
• Asegun Henry (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)
• Kedar Hippalgaonkar (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)
• Bolin Liao (University of California, Santa Barbara, USA)
• Jonathan Malen (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
• Alan McGaughey (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
• Ravi Prasher (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA)
• Ali Shakouri (Purdue University, USA)
• Li Shi (The University of Texas at Austin, USA)
• Junichiro Shiomi (The University of Tokyo, Japan)
• Avi Shultz (Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy, USA)
• G. Jeffrey Snyder (Northwestern University, USA)
• Zhiting Tian (Cornell University, USA)
• Jeffrey Urban (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA)
• Sebastian Volz (Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo, France)
• Evelyn N. Wang (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)
• Xiaojia Wang (University of Minnesota, USA)
• Junqiao Wu (University of California, Berkeley, USA)
• Xianfan Xu (Purdue University, USA)
• Ronggui Yang (Huazhong University of Science & Technology, China)

Symposium Organizers