Annual 2D Materials Summer School
With support from NSF NNCI (National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure), at the UMN node, we co-organize a yearly 2D Summer School at the UMN, intended for undergraduate and graduate students. The first event occurred June 6, 2016, and featured cleanroom tours, hands-on lab activities that illustrate nanoscience concepts, and a full day of lectures by renowned speakers on 2D materials. The second 2D Summer School occurred in May, 2017, and was also very well-received. These summer schools were oversubscribed and featured presentations by the leaders in the field of 2D materials. These summer schools also featured a second day of hands-on tutorials in both computational and experimentation. In previous years 2D Summer School, students were exposed to computer modeling of graphene pn junction and plasmonics, conducted by Drs. Roberto Grassi, Andrei Nemilentsau and Anshuman Kumar. Matlab scripts were handed out and the students got hands-on experience in modeling these graphene devices. For the Summer School event, students from outside of UMN were offered travel scholarships, with emphasis on minority and under-represented groups. NNCI supports up to 12 such participants for every summer school. The last installment of this summer school was held in the summer of 2018. These schools featured prominent speakers in the 2D field, such as Siddharth Rajan, Wendy Zhu, Eric Pop, Scott Bunch, Enrico Rossi, Donhee Ham, Tony Low, Steve Koester, Deji Akinwande, Boris Yakobson, James Hone, Evan Reed, Albert Davydov, Efthimios Kaxiras, Fengnian Xia, Joshua Caldwell, Aaron Franklin, Eugene Mele, Abhay Pasupathy, Charlie Johnson, Roland Kawakami, Vinod Menon, Andras Kis, Andrey Chaves, Chris Hinkle, Sokrates Pantelides, Depdeep Jena, Mathieu Luisier, Matthias Batzill, Phil Feng. The program and videos are available at these links.
2016 Program, 2017 Program, 2018 Program, 2019 Program
Science Museum of Minnesota
We entered an agreement to work with the Science Museum of Minnesota, which is one of the lead institutions for the NSF-funded Nanoscale Informal Science Education (NISE) network, whose goal is to promote public awareness of nanoscale research. We are currently working closely with the Museum to organize the “Sit with a Scientist” program during NanoDays events in April of each year. Most of the visitors to the Museum during NanoDays are K-12 students and their parents and teachers, so this activity allows us to connect with a large pool of young students and the general public to explain the benefits of our research to society. Museum will assign booth space for a “Seeing 2D Materials” display. Interactive exhibition on the excellent thermal, electrical and diamagnetic properties of graphene was on display on April 2018 at the Science Museum. See photos below on children getting engaged on the amazing properties of 2D materials!
Check out the amazing Science Museum of Minnesota here for any upcoming events. Check out also their Nano Exhibits here.
Nanophotonics of 2D Materials (N2D) Conference
Over the past decade, there is a growing research activity on light-matter interactions in atomically thin materials, such as graphene, topological insulators, thin polar and semiconducting layers and other van der Waals materials, including their heterostructures. Nanophotonics of 2D materials (N2D) aims at the exploration of their optical phenomena and in providing a setting where researchers from diverse fields can convene; classical and quantum optics; excitons, phonons and plasmons; far-field and near field spectroscopies; many body optical physics; topological photonics; among many others. Through these interactions, N2D seeks to provide a setting where unifying concepts can form, new ideas inspired, and new frontiers in theoretical and experimental research on 2D materials nanophotonics can emerge. The conferences were held in Spain and China, from 2019-2020, and were conducted online in 2021. The N2D 2023 will again be held in San Sebastian, Spain. We acknowledge sponsorships from Spanish government, ACS Photonics, Neaspec, among other institutions.
Check out the conference webpage here for more information about the upcoming N2D conference. You can also check out the past programs of N2D at these links, N2D 2017, N2D 2019, N2D 2020, N2D 2021.
