Funding the frontiers of materials science

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Dec 22, 2010

When it comes to funding dollars, the National Science Foundation's Division of Materials Research (DMR) is one of America's most important backers of materials science.

Next year, this government agency will allocate close to $320 million on a wide-ranging programme of advanced materials research and technology innovation.

In this exclusive physicsworld.com video interview, Ian Robertson, the DMR's incoming director, talks about growth areas – nanoelectronics, photovoltaics and data-enabled science among others – and what the agency is doing to encourage high-risk, high-payoff interdisciplinary research.

As for the "next big thing", Robertson doesn't have a crystal ball, but he does predict a pivotal role for computational materials science and simulation in areas like synthesis, processing and the modelling of next-generation materials.

"My feeling is that it is not going to impact one area of materials science, but the entire field," says Robertson, who is also a Donald B Willett professor of engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

This interview forms part of a series filmed at the Materials Research Society (MRS) Fall Meeting in Boston. See also "Living in a material world".

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The end of the world in 2012? Science communication and science scares

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell DBE FRS, University of Oxford

21st December 2012 marks an ending of the Mayan calendar and is asserted by some to mark the end of the world. This scare is examined from an astronomical point of view, followed by some reflections on what the scare tells us about the communication of science.

This lecture is the 2011 Michael Faraday Prize Lecture.

Now a Visiting Professor at Oxford University, Professor Bell Burnell has been Dean of Science at the University of Bath and for ten years Professor of Physics at The Open University, with a year as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Princeton University, USA. A Physics degree at Glasgow University, was followed by a PhD at Cambridge in radio astronomy. During her time there she was involved in the discovery of pulsars.

In 2008 she became the first female President of the Institute of Physics. She is a fellow of the Royal Society and a Foreign Member of the US National Academy of Science, and has received numerous awards from learned bodies and universities in the UK and the USA. Professor Bell Burnell sees public engagement with science as important, and by being visible she hopes to encourage more women into science.

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Printing and Graphic Science Student Conference 2010

1st December 2010 at 12:00 pm

The IOP Printing and Graphics Science Group annual Student Conference is a forum where recent work in the group’s subject areas at postgraduate level is presented. This year the conference is being hosted by the University of Manchester. Location and attendance details are below the following agenda.

11:30 Registration
11:55 Welcome
12:00 Facial features as visual cues for perceiving characteristics
Yinqiu Yuan, University of Leeds
12:20 Impact of colour attributes on colour emotions for complex images
Joohee Jun, University of Leeds
12:40 Image adaptive Black Point Compensation
Yerin Chang, London College of Communication
13:00 New attributes of Colour Appearance System
Yoonji Cho, University of Leeds

13:20 Lunch

14:10 Implementation of Preference Image Quality Metrics in Evaluation Reference Medium Gamut
Lirui Peng, London College of Communication
14:30 Stability of Colour Photographs in Mixed Archives
Ann Fenech, University College London
14:50 The full history of spreading of an inkjet-printed drop on a wettable surface
Sungjune Jung, University of Cambridge
15:10 The effect of Rheology on the Drying Process of a Solvent-based ink
Christopher Chapman, Swansea University
15:30 Rheological and physical characterisation of modern industrial paints to generate model fluid systems
Sreedhara Sarma, University of Bradford

15:50 Coffee

16:15 Mechanical bending durability of ITO thin films deposited by pulsed laser deposition on polymer substrates for flexible electronic devices
Grzegorz Potoczny, University of Birmingham
16:35 Developments of Energetic Printable Delay Compositions for Shock Tube Detonators
Tuuli Grohn, University of Cambridge
16:55 Carbon Nanostructures as Materials for Functional Printing
Neil Graddage, Swansea University
17:15 Excimer Laser processing of spin coated transparent conducting SnO2:Sb films for flexible electronics
Neranga Abeywickrama, Nottingham Trent University

17:35 Award of prizes for best presentations IOP PGS committee
17:45 Conference close

To attend please register, to give the numbers for catering, by sending an email to leszek.majewski@manchester.ac.uk

Details of the location, building and room are as follows.
Room E007, Renold Building, University of Manchester
Renold Building is #8 in the top left section of the Campus Map.
http://www.manchester.ac.uk/medialibrary/maps/campusmap.pdf
And is an easy walk from Piccadilly Station.

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Graphene Week 2011: Fundamental Science of Graphene and Applications of Graphene-Based Devices

Chaired by: Vladimir Falko, Lancaster University, UK; Andre Geim, University of Manchester, UK (Nobel Prize in Physics 2010); Karsten Horn, Fritz-Haber-Institut Berlin, DE & Sankar Das Sarma, University of Maryland, US.

The Graphene Week 2011 conference will be devoted to science and technology of graphene, advances in its growth and chemical processing, manufacturing graphene-based devices and studies of electronic transport, investigation of physical properties using ARPES, STM and AFM, emerging applications of this new material. It will also address studies of optical properties of graphene and their applications in optoelectronics, graphene manufacturing by mechanical and chemical exfoliation, synthesis on SiC, and growth on metals and semiconductors. Sessions will also cover the emerging studies of nanomechanical devices incorporating graphene flakes.

The conference programme will incorporate invited reviews, contributing talks, and two poster sessions. The organizers will welcome all researchers working on graphitic systems and scientists and postgraduate students from all countries.

Invited speakers will include:
? Igor Aleiner - Columbia U., US ? Antonio Castro Neto - Boston U., US/ U. of Singapore, SG ? Hongjie Dai * - U. of Stanford, US ? Yuriy Dedkov - FHI Berlin, DE ? Michael Fuhrer - Maryland U., US ? Roman Gorbachev - Manchester U., UK ? Francisco Guinea - Madrid U., ES ? Byung Hee Hong - Sungkyunkwan U., KR ? Euyheon Hwang - Maryland U., US ? James Hone - Columbia U., US ? Alexey Kuzmenko - Geneve U., CH ? Brian LeRoy - U. of Arizona, US ? Alan MacDonald - U. of Texas, US ? Charles Marcus - Harvard U., US ? Konstantin Novoselov - Manchester U., UK ? Tomás Palacios - MIT, US ? Marcos Pimenta - U. of Minas Gerais, BR ? Aron Pinczuk - Columbia U., US ? Eli Rotenberg - Berkeley U., NL ? Tomas Seyller - U. Erlangen-Nürnberg, DE ? Feng Wang - UC Berkeley, US ? Amir Yacoby - Harvard U., US ? Rozitsa Yakimova - Linköping U., SE ? Alex Zettl * - Berkeley U., US (* to be confirmed)

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US loses status as a 'colossus of science'

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Nov 12, 2010

The US is no longer a "colossus of science" according to a new report looking into the country’s scientific output. Written by information-services provider Thomson Reuters, it says that although the US still holds a "commanding" lead in terms of its research impact, its forerunner status is being eroded. The report blames this on a rapid rise in scientific publishing from countries in Asia and Europe.

The report, released yesterday, notes that the Asia-Pacific region has now overtaken the US in terms of published papers and spending on research. In 2008 the US invested $384bn while Asian countries invested $387bn in total, and while researchers in the US published around 310,000 papers in 2009, over 330,000 were published by scientists in the Asia-Pacific region.

In the physical sciences, the report notes that investment in physics and engineering in the US has "taken a back seat" compared to the biological science at a time when countries in Asia are increasing their spending on research in the physical sciences. "In physics, the trend for the US in terms of world share is distinctly downward," says the report.

The report also warns that while some counties, such as the UK, have maintained their share of the world’s scientific output while faced with growing global competition that fraction in the US has fallen. Indeed, the report highlights research into materials science as one particular area of decline. In 1994 the US published nearly a third of all papers in materials research but this has now reduced to 15%, while China now publishes 23% of papers, and the 27 nations that make up the European Union (EU) publish around 30%.

"Considering the recent rapid acceleration of physics output in China the data in the report is no surprise," says Werner Marx, an information scientist from the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, Germany. "Europe is already beginning to match the US’s performance in terms of citation impact and the question now is how rapidly countries in Asia will catch up".

However, it is not all gloomy news. The report says that the current state of scientific research in the US remains strong, with "excellent academic institutions that are a magnet for the best minds worldwide" and that the US provides "significant" funding in research and development, which stood at 2.8% of Gross Domestic Product in 2009.

The Thomson Reuters report into the impact of US research comes days after the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization released its Science Report 2010. The report, which is published every five years, says that China is now "a hair's breadth" away from having more researchers than the US and the EU and that it now publishes more scientific articles than Japan.

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