Symposium EE, "Self-Organization and Nanoscale Pattern Formation", will be held at the 2011 MRS Fall meeting in Boston. It will bring together a large community of researchers who utilize self-organization and self-assembly to synthesize and functionalize nanostructured materials. The symposium will cover a broad spectrum of materials, from polymeric and supra-molecular systems, to semiconductors, oxides, and metals, and a broad spectrum of applications, ranging from photonics and plasmonics, to gas sensors, catalytic materials, and materials subjected to irradiation or plastic deformation. The underlying principles responsible for self-organization are often similar in these situations, so the symposium will provide opportunities for researchers from one particular area to learn and potentially transfer recent knowledge gained in other areas. The requested support will be used to facilitate the participation of graduate students, female researchers, and researchers from underrepresented minorities. The high cost of attending the symposium can prevent some graduate students to attend, present their research results and inhibit exposure to the state-of-the-art research and acquiring direct feedback on their research from senior researchers. Offering a partial support to offset registration fees and traveling costs provides an effective means to ensure a broad participation from graduate students. The field of self-organization and self-assembly for the synthesis and investigation of nanostructures is extremely active and diverse, and attendance at this symposium is expected to have beneficial impacts on the careers of these researchers.
Our interest in promoting this symposium was that self-organization and nanoscale patterning is a growing research field, which produces exciting new fundamental knowledge and offers novel pathways to impactful and potentially transformational applications. This field is, however, very broad; and it is important to organize symposium like this one to bring together this diverse community and to facilitate cross-fertilization of ideas, models, simulations, and techniques. The range of materials covered in our symposium reflected that diversity, ranging from polymeric and supra-molecular systems, to semiconductors, oxides, and metals; and it was combined with a broad spectrum of applications, ranging from photonics and plasmonics, to gas sensors, catalytic materials, and materials subjected to irradiation or plastic deformation. We believe that it is essential that young researchers, namely graduate students, post-doctoral researchers, and junior faculty be exposed to that diversity for our field to continue to flourish in the near future. We received 207 abstracts for our symposium. After reviewing the submitted abstracts and rejecting a small fraction of them, we prepared a technical program that ran over four full days of oral presentations, with two evening poster sessions. In total, 82 oral presentations were given, and 86 posters were presented. By comparison with typical numbers for Fall MRS meeting symposia, our symposium was in the top tier in terms of number of participants. The attendance during the sessions was very good, ranging from 40 to 100, and the poster session were also well attended. The NSF funding made it possible to partially offset the costs of attending the meeting for 31 graduate students, who each received an average of $226 toward their travel expenses.
