From Munich to London to Rome: Kieran Walsh on presenting at European conferences

Third year PGR student Kieran Walsh talks about his experience of presenting at conferences in Munich (LOPEC 2019), London (MCEC 2019) and Rome (HOPV 2019):

“Over the past 3 months I have attended a number of conferences to give talks on my recent work involving graphene electrodes for energy harvesting. These conferences have taken place in Munich (LOPEC 2019), London (MCEC 2019) and Rome (HOPV 2019) and have been an invaluable learning experience, both in terms of the content of the conferences but also my skills as a presenter and scientific communicator. My talks were all slightly different, but mainly focussed on graphene electrodes for triboelectric energy harvesting and for photovoltaic energy harvesting. Depending on the conference I emphasized different results, or would contextualize the work slightly differently. the results themselves, however, remained the same.

The first of the conferences taking place was LOPEC 2019, which is the largest international meeting concerning large-scale printed organic electronics. This gave me a fantastic opportunity to see where my research sat in a much more commercial environment, with dozens of companies and hundreds of representatives from different businesses in attendance. Hearing from industry allows researchers to take a step back from the issues they face in a lab to consider what might the problems be 5-10 years down the line when commercial products are going to be made as a result of the materials/technologies we are working on. While this might not always provide the solutions to the future’s problems, it is always important for scientists to consider what the technological landscape of the future might look like so they can better direct their research. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed presenting at this conference despite it being geared more towards industry than academia.

I presented at LOPEC along with second year PGR Conor Murphy, who presented a poster on “Iron chloride intercalated few-layer graphene electrodes in flexible OLED devices”

 

The second conference I was presenting at was the Materials for Clean Energy Conference (MCEC), taking place at the National Physical Laboratory in London.

 

While MCEC was a much smaller conference, it perfectly fitted with my research topic and still attracted very accomplished researchers in the field. The talks I attended were of a very high standard, and there was a great buzz of discussion between sessions. This, to me, was the most valuable aspect of the conference, as everyone seemed at ease to ask each other questions and openly discuss the challenges and rewards of their research.

This was particularly helpful to me when being asked questions after my talk, hearing interest from other researchers was very reassuring, as well as giving me a few new ideas to try when I got back in the lab!

 

The final conference I attended this spring was the Hybrid and Organic Photovoltaics (HOPV) conference in Rome, bringing together hundreds of experts in photovoltaics from all over the world.

 

The quality of work at this conference was staggering, most of which was geared towards Perovskite photovoltaics (the poster child of the photovoltaics world over the last decade). However, there were still a number of talks that were more specific to my area of research into flexible devices. This was definitely the most inspiring conference that I have been to, with many talks emphasising how vital research into renewable energies is. It can sometimes be hard to see how what you do in a lab relates to the giant problems facing the world, but at conferences like this you can see how your small piece fits into the larger puzzle. I left Rome with fresh ideas to try out, eager to get back into the labs in Exeter.”

MCEC was organised by the CDT; to read more about our inaugural conference and the contributions of the other students who attended, please check out our recent post.