This past December 2015 the UVM Materials Research Society (MRS) Chapter, in partnership with the Materials Science Program, organized the international workshop on Advanced Materials for Energy and Bioengineering Applications (AMEBA), which brought together experts in organic photovoltaics, bio-inspired electronics, flexible and bio-compatible materials from Japan, Austria, and United States with UVM graduate students, UVM faculty, and local industry representatives. The scientific program was designed similarly to an MRS annual meeting session, giving an equal opportunity for guests and hosts to showcase their research and explore opportunities for collaborations.

Among the distinguished guests were Professor Tsukasa Yoshida from the prestigious Research Center for Organic Electronics Institute (ROEL) Institute, the birthplace of white-light organic light emitting diodes panels at Yamagata University (Japan); Dr. Joe Berry, senior staff scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Colorado; Dr. Talia Gershon from the IBM Watson Research Center (New York); and a team of graduate students from the Linz Institute for Organic Semiconductors (LIOS) (Austria) led by Prof. Eric Głowacki. They were joined by the following professors in the UVM Materials Science program: Madalina Furis, Randall Headrick, Matthew White (Physics); Severin Schneebeli and Adam Whalley (Chemistry); and Patrick Lee, Rachael Oldinski, and Frederic Sansoz (Engineering). Drs. Gary Carver and Sarah Locknar from the Omega Optical Research division and UVM graduate students S. Fenn, K. Hua, L. Manning, N. Rawat, S. Yao, S. Sengupta, J. Wan, as well as the rest of the MRS Chapter members, also acted as gracious hosts, handling the workshop logistics.

This workshop is a recognition of sustained research contributions from our young and dynamic Materials Science faculty members to the field of organic electronics and flexible materials. For the past ten years their endeavors materialized in prestigious NSF CAREER grant awards (five out of twenty faculty members in the program are recipients) and a series of high-profile papers in journals such as Nature Materials, Nature Communications, Nanoletters, Angewandte Chemie, and Biomaterials. The event was co-sponsored by the Graduate College, CAS, CEMS, and Omega Optical, Inc.