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DAY 3
TUESDAY, September 22
The
International Conference on Advanced
Materials 2009 (ICAM 2009) completed its third day of activities in Rio
de Janeiro, Brazil, on Tuesday, September 22. The major events of the day included
two plenary talks, by Prof. C.N.R. Rao and Prof. Knut Urban, as well as the
announcement of the International Union of
Materials Research Societies (IUMRS) Somiya Award in the evening. Poster
sessions continued into the second day as did the exhibit.
IUMRS
SOMIYA AWARD PRESENTATION
The
IUMRS Somiya award honors an international research team that has
collaborated across at least two continents, with the work being of the
highest scientific quality with major impact. It is very appropriate that
the 2009 Somiya award was given to a team spanning three continents
including South America since this meeting is being held in Brazil. The
winning researchers are Mildred Dresselhaus (USA), Ado Jorio (Brazil),
Antonio Gomes de Souza Filho (Brazil), Marcos Pimenta (Brazil), Morinobu
Endo (Japan), Riichiro Saito (Japan), and Mauricio Terrones (Mexico). These
researchers collaborated significantly over the past decade in the general
area of carbon nanotubes and contributed significantly.
 
 
Marcos
Pimenta then presented a brief overview of the various research activities
within this collaboration, by necessity having to focus only on some
aspects due to time limitations. He started by suggesting that there are
numerous collaborators who should also share in this award including Peter
Eklund who passed away recently. He presented statistics of the
collaborations between members of the team, showing truly remarkable number
of publications. He then chronologically showed the various major pieces of
research as represented by the appropriate major publications starting from
Raman studies of benzene-derived graphite fibers by Dresselhaus and Endo in
1982 to electronic structure of chiral graphene tubules in 1992 to
resonance Raman study of carbon nanotube bundles in 1998 representing the
first Brazil-MIT connection in this area. Pimenta presented numerous other
studies over the years with graduate students and post-docs periodically
traveling to Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. The most recent work in this
long line of collaborative effort was a recent report in Science on shaping
the edges of graphene using Joule heating by Terrones and Dresselhaus.
Pimenta concluded by thanking all the funding agencies in four different
countries who made this collaboration possible over three continents.
Rio!
© Materials Research Society, 2009
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