Exeter’s Metamaterials delegation returned from the biennial Materials Research Exchange 2020 event with a poster prize, a wide range of contacts made, and new insights in the UK materials landscape across industry, academia, and UKRI.
2 eventful days in London with over 80 speakers, 1500 delegates, and 70 exhibitors attending enabled interesting conversations on how Exeter’s expertise could feed into projects such as replaceable car batteries; security elements for bank notes; and utilisation of AI for metamaterial identification, modelling, and characterisation. Both Innovate UK’s deputy chair and Chief Business Officer, Simon Edmunds, and EPSRC’s new Head of Advanced Materials, Claire Spooner, visited our stand for conversations on metamaterials and the UKRI landscape.
Prof Alastair Hibbins, Director of the Centre for Metamaterial Research and Innovation and its Doctoral Training Centre XM², engaged the audience in a dedicated metamaterials session with a talk on “Metamaterials v2.0 – Beyond Cloaking”, followed by presentations on acoustic and mechanical/elastic/seismic metamaterials from colleagues at Imperial College London, University of Sussex, and Southampton.
Finally, our very own Conor Murphy, PhD student in our Centre for Doctoral Training (XM²) won 1st prize for his poster explaining how GraphExeter outperforms Indium tin oxide (ITO) as flexible transparent electrode in OLED.
