Keynote Speakers

Professor Pulickel Ajayan

Professor Paola Ayala

Professor Claudia Backes

Professor Jonathan Coleman

Professor Wolfgang Maser

Professor Rahul Raveendran Nair

Professor M M Shaijumon

Professor Ravi Silva

Professor Mauricio Terrones

Professor Pulickel Ajayan

Professor Ajayan is a professor in Engineering at Rice University. He is the founding chair of Rice University's 'Materials Science and NanoEngineering' department and also holds joint appointments with the Department of Chemistry and Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. Ajayan's present research interests include nanotechnology enabled energy storage devices (battery, supercapacitor and hybrid devices), nanocomposites, layered materials, 3D nanostructured materials, and smart material systems.

Professor Paola Ayala

Professor Paola Ayala leads the group Tailored Hybrid Structures embedded at Electronic Properties of Materials. From 2011 to 2015 she held the Berta Karlik Professorship, and holds now an appointment as Associate Professor at the University of Vienna. Ayala works on the production and spectroscopy of filled and substitutionally doped carbon nanotubes. More broadly, her group expects to contribute to the physics of strongly correlated phenomena in materials. In addition, they aim to advance fields that derive wider positive effects from nanoresearch such as biological systems and the environment.

Professor Claudia Backes

Professor Backes' work is focused on exploiting liquid-exfoliated layered, two-dimensional nanomaterials as versatile building blocks for further solution processing and supramolecular chemistry. These include, for example, transition metal dichalcogenides like MoS2 or WSe2 and III-VI semiconductors like GaS. Backes applies a number of spectroscopic and microscopic techniques to both understand and tune the properties of a broad variety of layered materials. Very similar to graphene, these layered materials exhibit distinct physical and electronic properties from their bulk counterparts when exfoliated down to mono- or few-layered species. Size control therefore offers equally exciting possibilities to tailor materials for specific needs as surface modification and functionalisation.

Professor Jonathan Coleman

Professor Jonathan Coleman is the Erasmus Smith's Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy in the School of Physics and a Principal Investigator in CRANN at Trinity College Dublin. Coleman's research focuses on solution-processing of nanomaterials and their use in applications. He is most well-known for the development of liquid phase exfoliation, a widely used method for preparing two-dimensional nanosheets.

Professor Wolfgang Maser

Wolfgang Maser is a Senior Research Scientist at the CSIC. His research topics cover the synthesis, functionalization, processing, and characterisation of various types of carbon nanostructures, including carbon nanotubes (CNTs), graphene oxide, and derivatives. Maser's research also covers the development of advanced nanocomposites and hybrid materials based on carbon nanostructures.

Professor Rahul Raveendran Nair

Rahul Raveendran Nair is a Professor of Materials Physics at the University of Manchester, and holds a prestigious Royal Society University Research Fellowship. The main scope of his research is the science and application of two-dimensional crystals and their modifications. His current research projects are studying molecular properties at extreme confinement, 2D materials functionalization, developing novel 2D materials-based membranes for water filtration, nanofiltration, gas separation and barrier coating, and proton conducting membranes for fuel cells.

Professor M M Shaijumon

Professor Shaijumon’s research interests are in the area of nanomaterials and energy storage and conversion, focusing on the synthesis of novel nanostructures, design and development of efficient energy storage devices, mostly looking at the materials science and physics of these systems. He is an editorial member for the International journal, Graphene. He received the DAE Young Scientist Research Award in 2012, and is one of the co-inventors of ‘paper battery’, a flexible nanocomposite based energy device, which has been patented.

Professor Ravi Silva

Professor Ravi Silva is the Director of the Advanced Technology Institute (ATI) at the University of Surrey, researching a wide range of activities, with a focus in nanotechnology and renewables, as well as being the head of the Nano-Electronics Centre (NEC). In particular, Professor Silva's research includes all of nano-biotechnology, nano carbons, nanotechnology, water technology, and electronic and photonic devices, including the characterisation, growth and processing of novel semiconductor materials for large area electronic applications.

Professor Mauricio Terrones

Professor Terrones' research focuses on understanding the Physics and Chemistry of materials at the nanoscale. In particular, his group studies low dimensional materials that mainly involve 1- and 2-Dimensions, ranging from carbon nanotubes and graphene nanoribbons to graphene, boron nitride and chalcogenide monolayers (e.g. WS2, MoS2, NbS2 , etc). Their research concentrates on challenging synthesis of novel nanoscale materials (1D and 2D) with unprecedented physico-chemical properties.