Impact of Professional Societies Involvement on Career Development
Read the article published by Dr. Anasori and his colleagues at MRS in the April issue of MRS Bulletin about the impact of service activities in professional societies on career progression. Dr. Anasori is the first chair of the Early Career Professionals Subcommittee of the Academic Affairs Committee of MRS. LINK
A New Event for the Faculty Candidates at the MRS Fall Meetings
The Early Career Professionals Subcommittee (ECPSC) of MRS (Chair: Babak Anasori) has created a new opportunity for those who are looking for a faculty position, called "Meet Your New Faculty Candidate–Poster Session". The poster session will be held every MRS Fall Meetings in Boston. The first poster session was held at the MRS Fall Meeting 2019 on Wednesday, Dec. 4th at 4 pm. In this poster session, faculty candidates could present their visions on research and teaching as a poster to the hiring search committees. There were ~ 100 submitted abstracts and more than thirty search committees attended this session in 2019.
Watch the MRS TV interview about this poster session.
SciVid 2019 Winners
The third Science in Video (SciVid) competition, created and chaired by Prof. Anasori, was held at the MRS Fall 2019 Meeting in Boston, MA. The Awards Ceremony was on Wednesday, Dec. 4th. SciVid 2019 top videos are posted on MRS YouTube Channel: [link].
NanoArtography 2019 at Purdue School of Engineering and Technology, IUPUI
NanoArtography is an international scientific image competition to promote artistic ways of presenting science. The 2019 competition was held at the Purdue School of Engineering and Technology, IUPUI and A.J. Drexel Nanomaterials Institute. The 2019 competition received more than 100 submissions worldwide. For more information visit NanoArtography website: https://www.nanoartography.org
365-25-7 Presentations (2018)
The second 365-24-7 Presentations Competition held in the Summer 2018, as a presentation competition and a workshop to enhance students’ oral presentation skills from conference talks to elevator speeches and first impression kind of presentations. The students practiced their three presentations with their mentors and Babak in two weeks prior to the competition day, in order to create polished presentations. Each presenter received a certificate of completion at the end. The winners, Natalia Noriega and William Reil, were selected as the best presenters for the 2018 competition and each received a $100 gift card.
This competition consists of three presentations: 365 seconds (conference type), 24 seconds (elevator speech), and 7 seconds (first impression). It was held at A.J. Drexel Nanomaterials Institute.
365-24-7 Competition is originated and chaired by Babak Anasori.
Science in Videos (SciVid)
SciVid is a video competition to encourage students to make two-minute videos about Materials Science and Engineering. The goal of this competition is to create a series of short videos about MSE to educate the general public about MSE, and encourage MSE students to think outside the box and improve their presentation skills. This competition is open to anyone who is passionate about materials science and engineering and held at the Materials Research Society (MRS) Fall Meetings in Boston, MA.
SciVid 2017 Awards Ceremony on November 29, 2017 during MRS Fall Meeting 2017
In the photo, SciVid 2017 winners: 1st Place: Fabien Debort (presented by Monica Morales), 2nd Place: Chandana Kolluru, 3rd Place: Antoni Forner Cuenca, Honorable Mention: Amin Vahid Mohammadi. Accompanied by Stephen Aldersley (President, GoodFellow), and Yury Gogotsi (A. J. Drexel Nanomaterials Institute), co-sponsors, with Babak Anasori, SciVid creator and chair.
Unexpected Discoveries Presentations
A presentation competition to promote critical thinking and encourage thinking outside the box in regards to research. The competition consists of a < 10-minute presentation about how lab research can actually solve daily problems. It encourage students to speculate about the undiscovered potential applications of the research and practice to be more creative with their undesired results. Winners received an award certificate and a $100 gift card. This competition was held at A.J. Drexel Nanomaterials Institute.
Kanit Hantanasirisakul, PhD student, was selected as the winner of the Unexpected Discoveries Presentations for his presentation titled “A secret of cooking MXenes”.
William Reil, STAR undergraduate student, was selected as the winner of the Unexpected Discoveries Presentations, Undergraduate Competition for his presentation titled “The MXene dog”.
365-25-7 Presentations
A presentation competition and a workshop to enhance students’ oral presentation skills from conference talks to elevator speeches and first impression kind of presentations. This competition consists of three presentations: 365 seconds (conference type), 24 seconds (elevator speech), and 7 seconds (first impression). The 2016 competition was held as a workshop in order to create polished presentations. Each presenter received a certificate of completion at the end. The winner, Kathleen Maleski, was selected as the best presenter for the 2016 competition and received a $100 gift card. This competition was held at A.J. Drexel Nanomaterials Institute.
NanoArtography
NanoArtography is an international scientific image competition to promote artistic ways of presenting science. Any kind of B&W or colorized microscopy images, computational simulation or combination of both are accepted. This competition is held at A.J. Drexel Nanomaterials Institute.
Materials in Music
To motivate more outside-the-box thinking, Materials in Music aims to encourage students to look for the song lyrics that are somehow related to materials science and engineering. It is up to the imagination of the student to relate the song to materials science, followed by finding scientific explanations to discuss whether the song makes sense in the world of materials science or not! Students play the song first and then explain the speculated science behind it! The first Materials Music Festival was held in Fall 2017 at the Drexel Nanomaterials Institute (DNI). Below are a few great examples of DNI graduate students presentations this year.
Materials Music Festival 2017 at Drexel Nanomaterials Institute
Kanit Hantanasirisakul (left) and Asia Sarycheva (right) presenting in the first Materials Music Festival.
Samantha Buczek (PhD Student), "Madiba Riddim" by Drake:
The song I chose for my presentation was Madiba Riddim by Drake and the lyric that caught my attention was “my heart is way too frozen to get broken”. Although we all understand what this line means figuratively, I wanted to show why it does not make sense from a material science perspective. To do this I referred to a property known as the glass transition temperature (Tg). The Tg describes the temperature region where a polymer, such as the collagen (Tg ~ 35°C) that makes up your heart, transitions from a hard, glassy material to a soft, rubbery material. There are a lot of proteins and fats that will increase its thermal capacity and make it harder to freeze than pure collagen; however, at low enough temperatures it will freeze and become more susceptible to fracture. Therefore, I took the liberty of revising the lyrics for Drake: “my heart is way too…above the glass transition temperature of collagen to fracture brittlely.”
Kathleen Maleski (PhD Candidate), "Radioactive" by Imagine Dragons:
Radioactivity is often viewed with a negative connotation in the scientific world due to the adverse health effects it can impose. In my Music Festival presentation, I chose the song “Radioactive” by Imagine Dragons. In my opinion, the lyrics portray two significant ages: the Old Age (the unstable age) and the New Age (the stable age). The Old Age lyrics are degraded, signifying the unstable quality of this time and supporting the negative meaning of the word "radioactivity". The lyrics are made of words such as ash, dust, chemicals, and apocalypse. In contrast, the lyrics transform throughout the song to words which are alive, bright and motivating, suggesting the birth of something new from the ashes of something old.
Patrick Urbankowski (PhD Candidate), "Crystalline" by Björk:
This song came from Björk album Biophilia, and each song on this album is related to science (biology, physics, geology, astronomy, and in this case, materials science). In this song, the lyrics, she mentions crystals growing, in Earth's core, and later mentions quartz.
So, with this presentation I aimed to investigate whether quartz is growing in Earth's core. The core must have cooled by 1000 °C since its formation 4.5 billion years ago, an amount of cooling that would be necessary to sustain the geomagnetic field, unless there was another source of energy available. The composition of Earth's core is mostly iron and nickel, however, researchers at Tokyo Institute of Technology have also predicted trace elements of other elements, including silicon and oxygen, to be present.
Researchers have simulated the pressures and temperatures at Earth's core to determine if phases like quartz, SiO2, can exist in the core. Determining that quartz can be present could solve the paradox of an energy source of Earth's magnetic field.
This album is a great example of fusing together art and science, and it was the artist's goal to educate listeners about different branches of science through these tracks. Furthermore, each song on the album was released as an interactive iPad app with a related science demo for each track, the first album to ever do such a thing.
Interactive 3D Models of MXene
If you do not have access to specialized software or MXene crystal structures, you can view the interactive M3X2 and M3X2Tx MXene structures below, designed by Saleesha Sin (Drexel 18). You can move these 3D models in any direction.