Moscone West Convention Center and San Francisco Marriott Marquis San Francisco, California

Meeting: April 9–13

Exhibit: April 10–12 www.mrs.org/spring2012

The 2012 Materials Research Society Spring Meeting will be held April 9–13, 2012, in San Francisco, Calif. The spring meetings have grown considerably in recent years, and this year’s meeting looks to be the largest yet. The scientific sessions will include many new and developing areas of materials research as well as some well-established and popular topics, with 11 of the 54 symposia co-sponsored by the Japan Society of Applied Physics (JSAP). To complement the scientific sessions, tutorials will provide detailed introductions to particularly exciting areas of research, while the exhibit will showcase products of interest to the materials community. The technical meeting and exhibits will be located at the Moscone West Convention Center and San Francisco Marriott Marquis.

Making up the core of the Meeting are the five topical clusters of the technical program.

Electronics and Photonics will include symposia with a focus on electronic and photonic materials, devices, and processing. In addition, superconductors, organic electronics, and Si photonics for interconnects, sensing, and imaging will be covered.

Materials Science and Materials Chemistry for Energy will include photovoltaics, energy conversion and storage, materials science for catalysis, solid-state ionics and complex oxides, thermoelectrics, nuclear materials, and electrochromics.

Nanostructured Materials and Devices will feature the production and characterization of nanomaterials with additional symposia devoted to new trends in carbon materials, nanomagnetism, thermoelectric nanostructures, metamaterials, nanoplasmonics, and top-ological insulators.

Table 1.

Biological, Biomedical, and Bio-inspired Materials will cover a wide range of topics from DNA nanotechnology to plasma processing for life sciences. Several symposia will explore the critical issues involved in interfacing biological systems with synthetic materials such as organic electronics, nanoparticles, and medical implants. Other areas to be covered include mechanobiology, the design of cellular microenvironments, and the synthesis of new materials based on biological building blocks.

The cluster on General Materials Science will round out the meeting with symposia on computation, in situ and local characterization techniques, rare-earth materials, functional particles, ionic liquids, and materials science education.

Symposium X on Frontiers of Materials Research will feature presentations for the broad materials community. With general concern about the environmental impact of the rapidly increasing volume of air traffic, fuel-cells systems represent a solution to cleaner power and enhanced energy efficiency. K. Andreas Friedrich of the German Aerospace Center (DLR)/University of Stuttgart will address DLR’s work—both experiments and modeling—on fuel-cell systems for aircraft applications to support or replace the existing systems.

Symposium X speaker Ksoichi Kitazawa of the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) will address current emphasis in Japan on game-changing energy technologies, in light of the recent Fukushima nuclear incident. The Japanese government has announced that it will follow a policy to decrease the level of dependence on nuclear energy, hence the country’s need to find novel energy sources and novel routes for substantial energy savings as soon as possible. In particular, Kitazawa sees opportunities emerging from a nanotechnology approach.

Hod Lipson of Cornell University directs the Creative Machines Lab, which focuses on making machines that create, and machines that are creative. He has led work in areas that include multimaterial functional rapid prototyping. In Symposium X, he will describe the evolution of additive manufacturing technologies and chronicle the past and future journey of three-dimensional printers that can currently fabricate, layer by layer, objects of almost any material—from nylon to glass, from chocolate to titanium—and with any complex geometry. Lipson will extend his talk to control over the multimaterial composition of matter with unprecedented fidelity as well as control over active behavior.

To coincide with the release of the MRS Bulletin special issue, “Materials for Sustainable Development,” a forum titled “The Many Facets of Sustainable Development” will be held on Monday, April 9. This event will feature economists, social scientists, and industrial ecologists to discuss other, broader aspects of sustainable development and bring new perspectives to the materials research community. The forum will feature several keynote speakers in the morning, followed by panel discussions on specific case studies in the afternoon.

An awards ceremony will be held at which this year’s Outstanding Young Investigator and recipient of the Innovations in Materials Characterization Award—endowed by Toh-Ming Lu and Gwo-Ching Wang—will be recognized, MRS Fellows will be honored, and Gold and Silver Graduate Student Awards will be presented to graduate students for symposium papers that exemplify significant and timely research. The inaugural Mid-Career Researcher Award, made possible through an endowment established by Aldrich Materials Science, will also be presented.

The Meeting will include a plenary address and a talk by the recipient of the Kavli Lectureship on Nanoscience, both yet to be announced.

Poster sessions will be held in the Moscone West (Exhibit Hall) on Tuesday from 5:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. and on Wednesday and Thursday from 8:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m at the San Francisco Marriott Marquis.

The meeting chairs will sponsor a Best Poster Award competition, selecting recipients each night on the basis of the posters’ technical content, appearance, graphic excellence, and presentation quality.

The popular Science as Art competition will again be held at this Meeting. The competition is open to all registered meeting attendees, with entries to be on display in the Moscone West Convention Center. Multiple first-place and second-place awards of $400 and $200, respectively, will be presented at the Meeting. The deadline for entries is February 15, 2012 (5:00 p.m. EST). Guidelines are available on the 2012 MRS Spring Meeting website, under “Special Events.”

MRS will host a Career Center; services offered to attendees include access to current job postings, a resume file for prospective employers, and on-site interview opportunities.

Graduate students and members of MRS University Chapters are invited to attend the student mixer reception. Also, chapter officers and faculty advisors are invited to attend a meeting of MRS University Chapter representatives to compare notes on recent activities and brainstorm on new projects and issues of common concern. Those interested in starting new chapters are welcome.

Presentations on funding opportunities from U.S. government agencies and various events for professional development and public outreach are also planned.

The deadline to pre-register for the Spring Meeting is March 23, 2012 (5:00 p.m. EST). International travelers are reminded to begin the visa process early. For additional information on the Spring Meeting, contact MRS Member Services, Materials Research Society, 506 Keystone Drive, Warrendale, PA 15086-7573, USA; email info@mrs.org, tel. 724-779-3003, and fax 724-779-8313.

Details of various events and activities will be published in the Program & Exhibit Guide available on-site. The MRS website can be accessed for updated information on confirmed talks and details on special events, for more information on obtaining a visa, and pre-registration at www.mrs.org/spring2012.