Nick Fahrenkopf's Blogs

Day 4 was also a travel day so I didn’t get to see much of the conference. I spent time packing, checking out, and getting out of the city before rush hour set in. But I did want to write about one unexpected but interesting talk, and recap some culinary highlights of the trip (sorry, I love food!)

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MRS Fall Meeting Day 3

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To be honest, most of today I was preoccupied getting ready for my talk in the afternoon. But, to take my mind of it I still tried to attend talks. I feel like sometimes conferences are hit or miss. Sometimes you could walk into a 15 minute contributed talk and be blown away. But other times the 30 minute invited talks could be a literature review or incremental research. A lot of the talks I went to today were incremental talks. It was a lot of “the field is at point A and we’ve brought it to A + dA”. So I heard about thin film transistors which could be useful for wearable electronics, but I didn’t feel like it was anything new. I heard another nanowire sensor talk, but again, nothing revolutionary.

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MRS Fall Meeting Day 2

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Before I get started with my summary of Day 2, I need to vent a bit. As a presenter 99% of the time you are not loud enough to not use a microphone, so please don’t try to forgo it. Also, 99% of the time you will cover 1 slide per minute. So, a 15 minute presentation should not have 40 slides. You will never cover all of that material. Please rethink what point you want to get across. I’m constantly disappointed by folks who have the fly through their results due to poor planning. I’m also disappointed when chairs don’t stick to the schedule. There are multiple sessions all over the place so when I show up at 10:15 to see talk X and you just started talk X-1 because you’re running 15 minutes late, that means I can’t see X and still make it to the 10:30 talk in a different session. The times are more than a suggestion!

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MRS Fall Meeting Day 1

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Today was a travel day, but I was still able to attend a number of biomedical engineering talks which are personally interesting to me, and some talks on memristors, which some of my lab mates work on. I’ve explained elsewhere what a memristor is, but briefly it is a metal-insulator-metal material stack that has two resistance states (high and low). If that sounded like goobldy-gook to you, imagine a chunk of wood sandwiched in between two chunks of copper metal. Normally electricity won’t flow between the two chunks of copper through the wood (high resistance). In a memristor you can apply a high voltage to create a conductive path through the “wood” creating a low resistance state. This is useful for computers because it can be used as a memory device: high versus low translates to a 1 or a 0. If you make lots of these you have the memory chip that could be used in your computer or cell phone. These are better than what we have now because they take no power to maintain the data, and can be fabricated much smaller so you can store even more songs and apps on your phone.

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Materials Research Society Fall Meeting

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I was a little disappointed to see how little the MRS Fall Meeting was getting mentioned on Twitter, so I decided to summarize some of the cool things I learned day by day. Before I get started, though, why MRS? Materials research might not sound glamorous but without it we wouldn’t have the advanced electronics we have today. Indeed, work continues to advance the development of better, faster, cheaper electronic devices, but materials researchers also work on alternative energy (solar cells, fuel cells) and biomedical technology (stem cell engineering, diagnostic sensors). It is this broad array of topics that interests me, as well as the shear size of MRS. Monday night the poster sessions had over 500 posters. And there are different poster sessions on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. I end up finding more interesting talks than I can actually attend. So, what I’d like to do is show you all a sample of some of the most interesting things that I’ve come across for the four days I’m at MRS.

Side note: If you find or know anyone else covering this conference please send them my way. I'm on Twitter @NanoBioNick

Update: You can read my day-by-day coverage here: . . . More