[Image above] From left, conference organizer Yang Bai, conference organizer Jungho Ryu, plenary speaker Haixia (Alice) Zhang, plenary speaker Olfa Kanoun, plenary speaker Meiling Zhu, plenary speaker Miso Kim, session chair Sohini Kar-Narayan, and conference organizer Shashank Priya. Credit: ACerS
Just over 100 scientists from around the globe gathered Sept. 4–6, 2019, in Falls Church, Va., to share their research in energy harvesting at the 3rd Annual Energy Harvesting Society Meeting.
“This was a unique and friendly meeting for energy harvesting,” says Miso Kim, plenary speaker and senior research scientist at the Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science. “Typically energy harvesting will be just one symposium at a much larger conference; with the focus solely on this topic, we don’t have to defend the importance of what we are doing. We can instead focus on things like real-world applications of energy harvesting.”
Kim was one of six plenary speakers at the meeting in an all-female plenary lineup. The title of her talk was “Tailoring materials and structures for energy harvesting: From nanofibers to metamaterials.” In addition to the plenary talks, the conference featured three concurrent sessions that covered all aspects of energy harvesting, from energy generation, storage, and management to real-world applications. You can see all of the conference abstracts in the conference program.
According to program chair Shashank Priya, associate vice president for research and director of strategic initiatives at The Pennsylvania State University, this meeting started as a small workshop in 2005, and then two years ago the Energy Harvesting Society (EHS) meeting debuted at The Pennsylvania State University. This year was the third year for the meeting, and the first year it was organized by The American Ceramic Society.
“Most of us here got our starts many years ago as students with The American Ceramic Society, so I’m happy to have this affiliation with ACerS,” Priya says. “I think this year’s meeting was a success in that we have provided a forum for people to meet and discuss their energy harvesting research, as well as make valuable connections that they can use long after this meeting in their research.”
Invited speaker Joseph Poon, professor of physics at the University of Virginia, also felt the meeting was helpful to him in his career.
“I really liked the scale of the meeting because I felt I had the opportunity to interact with everyone,” Poon says. “I teach a course on energy and will be taking back information I learned through talks here and will share it with my students. The networking has been great.”
Olfa Kanoun, chair for measurement and sensor technology at Technische Universität Chemnitz in Germany, gave the final plenary talk on Friday titled “Symbiosis of energy conversion and system design for efficient energy harvesting solutions.” She stressed the importance of optimizing system design with energy harvesting to realize the best performance for an affordable, real-life application.
“I have seen talks on all of these aspects this week, and this is why I feel this conference has been successful,” Kanoun says.
The 4th Annual Energy Harvesting Society Meeting will be held Aug. 16–21, 2020, at the Hyatt Regency Bellevue in Bellevue, Wash., a suburb of Seattle. The conference will be colocated with the Materials Challenges in Alternative and Renewable Energy (MCARE 2020) conference.
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