Call for Papers

Please contact the symposium organizers with questions.

A strategic goal of healthy social development is an increasing use of resources. The key to a cleaner future is the sustainable use of these resources, which ultimately requires non-destructive resource lifecycles. Materials and Energy are the intertwined resources that enable life on Earth. Energy requires materials and vice versa, hence the central role of materials and the future need to make our use of them as sustainable as possible. Although complete sustainability of the materials we need and use is impossible (entropy!), the nearly “inexhaustible” combination of solar and geothermal energy sources can provide a sufficiently high level of sustainability, say < ~0.5% / year critical material “loss”, for the foreseeable and imaginable future. Achieving such a level will facilitate evolving towards as circular an economy as possible, but also requires major research in materials design and recycling, as well as up-front design and development of materials, technologies and devices. This circular thinking can be extended to a number of industrial sectors requiring Materials and Energy, e.g. electronics, which generates impressive amounts of waste (e-waste). Apart from increasing the fraction of energy materials that can be recycled for re-use and minimizing peripheral waste all-through the manufacturing processes, we need to extend useful lifetimes, in terms of their function, of these materials and the products made with them. In general, we want our energy materials and infrastructure to become more resilient, because they are sturdier, easier to repair, or can (self-) heal.

Topics will include:

• Designing sustainable energy materials
• Improving sustainability in chemical processing and manufacturing
• Life cycle analysis relevant to energy materials
• Approaches to enabling self-repair of materials
• Composite materials designed for recyclability
• Catalytic recycling
• Defect chemistry
• High entropy materials
• Materials in extreme environments and/or conditions: stability and durability
• Bioeconomy and bio-inspired circularity
• Photosynthesis-inspired approaches
• Materials, processes and devices for sustainable electronics
• E-waste valorization and urban mining

• A tutorial complementing this symposium is tentatively planned.

Invited Speakers (tentative):

• Daniel Brandel (Uppsala University, Sweden)
• David Cahill (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA)
• Kyoung-Shin Choi (University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA)
• Claudia Felser (Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids, Germany)
• David Ginley (National Renewable Energy Laboratory, USA)
• Klaus Hellgardt (Imperial College London, United Kingdom)
• Maria Holuszko (The University of British Columbia, Canada)
• Dong-Pyo Kim (Pohang University of Science and Technology, Republic of Korea)
• Igor Lubomirsky (Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel)
• Christine Luscombe (Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Japan)
• Deepa Madan (University of Maryland, USA)
• Ana Flavia Nogueira (UNICAMP, Brazil)
• Ange Nzihou (Ecole des Mines d'Albi-Carmaux, France)
• Elsa Olivetti (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)
• Vincenzo Pecunia (Simon Fraser University, Canada)
• Dierk Raabe (Max-Planck-Institut für Eisenforschung GmbH, Germany)
• Federico Rosei (Institut national de la recherche scientifique, Canada)
• Sabrina Sartori (University of Oslo, Norway)
• Alp Sherlioglu (Case Western Reserve University, USA)
• Naoya Sibata (The University of Tokyo, Japan)
• Susana Cordoba de Torresi (University of São Paulo, Brazil)
• Wenjie Xie (Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany)

Symposium Organizers