ETH Zürich and EMPA, Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Testing & Research
Laboratory for High Performance Ceramics (123)

What's your research area of interest? are you working? where?
I am working on “ceramic proton conductors”, which are electrolyte materials for proton conducting fuel cells. I am interested in the basic mechanism of their proton conductivity and I use neutron diffraction and quasi-elastic neutron scattering to investigate the rela-tionship between their structure and properties.

I am PhD student at the Department of Physics, ETH Zürich-Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and I work in the Laboratory for High Performance Ceramics Empa-Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science & Technology in Switzerland.

What's your experience with muons or neutrons techniques?
My colleagues have did neutron diffraction and quasi-elastic neutron scattering measure-ments for proton conducting materials. This summer I am going to do neutron measure-ments at SINQ, Paul Schererr Institute (PSI) in Switzerland. I also went to the FullProf school at Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL) in Grenoble, France to learn diffraction data analysis.

What was your specific interest in the 2010 MRS Spring Meeting?
The MRS Meeting is a very good chance to meet people from all over the world who work in relevant fields. As a young PhD student this chance is very important and exciting for me. As my work is closely related to neutron scattering and synchrotron radiation tech-niques, I was specifically interested in Symposium W (Diagnostics and Characterization of Energy Materials with Synchrotron and Neutron Radiation).

What was your goal?
My goal was to show my work to other people, most of them are more experienced than me and have dedicated to my field for years. By doing that I could hear the opinions from the same scientific community about my work. It is also very interesting for me to learn about the works of other people.

What was the role of neutrons in this Conference?
Neutron is one of the discussion topics in Symposium W. There I learned the applications of neutrons in the materials research of solid oxide fuel cells, hydrogen storage, solar cells, etc. In my talk I showed the results from our group on neutron diffraction and quasi-elastic neutron scattering on proton conducting ceramics.

Attending this conference gave you the opportunity to ..
In all the conferences I have attended the MRS meeting was of the highest level. I gave a talk there, which was the first time for me in an international conference like that. Also I was session chair and symposium assistant, which gave me the opportunity to get an idea about the hosting and management work of a conference. It was very precious experience at the beginning of my professional carrier.

How did you know about NMI3, European funded project, and the MRS support?
I found on the “call for abstracts” of the MRS Symposium W that partial support might be available for graduate students. I wrote an email to the symposium organizers and they helped me with obtaining the support.

Was helpful for you?
Indeed it was very helpful. Other PhD students in my lab are also eager to go for the MRS meeting and it would be difficult for our lab to support all the PhD students to attend the meeting. It was the support from NMI3 which made the trip for me to join the MRS meeting.

Back to NEWS & PRESS