From November 29 to December 4, 2015, the undergraduate students of Professor Guo Xugang’s research group of SUSTC’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering including Wang Yulun, Zhu Xucheng and Peng Changliang and the undergraduate students of Professor Tian Leilei’s research group including Wei Zixiang and Luan Tianqi were invited to the Materials Research Society 2015 Fall Meeting held in Boston, the United States.

The Materials Research Society (MRS), founded in 1972, currently has 16,000 members from the United States and other nearly 80 countries. Unlike other single-discipline associations in materials science, MRS encourages mutual exchanges of technical information among different disciplines influencing materials science. MRS holds two academic meetings annually and provides about 100 seminars for scholars attending the meetings. The meetings are world’s most prestigious, most influential and highest-level international meetings on materials science. The five students actively participated in the sessions relating to their respective research fields and discussed with and learned from elites and senior professors in the academic circles. During the break and poster exhibition time, the students talked with attendees boldly. They talked about the problems they had met in their research, listened to the guidance of the seniors and exchanged ideas.

A group photo of the undergraduate students of Professor Guo Xugang’s research group and Professor Tobin Marks

In the meeting, the undergraduate students of Professor Guo Xugang’s research group were very lucky to have met with Senior Professor Tobin Marks (Northwest University) and they had a pleasant conversation. A pleasant surprise was that Professor Tobin Marks also showed much care about the development of SUSTC. The students of Professor Tian Leilei’s research group had a communication with senior professors Zhigang Suo and Chad. A. Mirkin. The five students said they were very honored to be able to communicate with the authors of the top-level literature they had been studying and it was a great encouragement and help to their scientific research and life goals.

A group photo of the five students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

During the meeting, the five students also visited Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University in Cambridge, Boston, and led by Nano-Terra’s executive Jonathan Henne, they visited Professor George Whitesides’s laboratory at Harvard University. They felt an excellent and encouraging scientific research atmosphere.