Attendees of the 1st ECS Student Chapter Munich Symposium at the entrance of the TUM IAS building. TUM is the top academic institution by student ECS membership!

Student membership is fundamental to ECS. Without student members—its inquisitive, innovative minds—the ECS would not be the thriving organization it is today.

The ECS has put down roots in academic institutions around the world that grow each and every day. ECS staff recently analyzed membership data to determine which academic institutions had the greatest presence based upon student ECS membership.

The chart below lists the top 40 academic institutions based upon student ECS membership.

Note: This analysis recognizes only student ECS members in good standing. Expired members were not taken into account.

Check out the chart to find out if your institution made the list!

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ECS Student Chapter Munich hosted its first-ever symposium on February 15, 2016, featuring invited talks by Professor Jeff Dahn and Professor Thomas J. Schmidt, a poster session, and numerous opportunities for discussion and networking.

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On January 22, 2016, the ECS Montreal Student Chapter hosted its first ever electrochemistry workshop. The focus of the workshop was the fabrication of silver-silver chloride reference electrodes, a staple of most electrochemistry experiments.

The workshop included a short presentation discussing the theoretical aspects of references electrodes, after which students could observe a demonstration. Finally, each student was allowed to perform the fabrication protocol and everyone brought home their own reference electrode!

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On Friday, May 6, 2016, the ECS New England section will host a meeting featuring a distinguished speaker at Northeastern University, and you’re invited!

What’s more, this event is free to attend! So come on out to Boston for a night, engage with your peers in the ECS community, and learn about redox flow batteries from an expert in the field of electrochemistry!

Location

Northeastern University
Boston, Massachusetts
Egan Research Building
Room 306
Directions

Schedule

6:00 p.m. | Welcome & Election of Section Officers
7:00 p.m. | Invited Talk | Dr. Ertan Agar, Assistant Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Massachusetts Lowell

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Are you a current or prospective ECS member interested in long-term membership within our thriving community? If so, then multi-year membership may be for you!

ECS offers different membership plans to meet the needs of individuals in academica, industry, and government. The multi-year membership option is designed to accommodate your personalized needs. For your convenience, the multi-year membership option allows you to choose to become an ECS member for 2 years, 3 years, or 5 years.

What’s more, all three of these options will result in savings!

See the table below for multi-year membership pricing.

As a multi-year member, you will receive all of the benefits of ECS membership, including 100 free full-text downloads from the ECS Digital Library, discounts on meeting registrations, unlimited electronic access to ECS meeting abstracts, and a subscription to Interface.

Make a lasting commitment to the ECS and stop worrying about renewing your membership every single year. Become a multi-year member today!

Questions? Contact customerservice@electrochem.org.

Congratulations to the recipients of the 2016 ECS Summer Fellowships!

Offered since 1928, the summer fellowship program is designed to assist students during the summer months, June through September, in the pursuit of work in a field of interest to the ECS.

Fellowship Recipients

Dr. Yelena Gorlin
Technische Universität München
Supervisor, Dr. Hubert A. Gasteiger
Colin Garfield Fink Summer Fellowship*

Soo Kim
Northwestern University
Advisor, Dr. Christopher M. Wolverton
Edward G. Weston Summer Fellowship

Charuksha T. Walgama
Oklahoma State University
Advisor, Dr. Sadagopan Krishnan
Joseph W. Richards Summer Fellowship

Muhammad Boota
Drexel University
Advisor, Dr. Yury Gogotsi
F. M. Becket Summer Fellowship

Michael Metzger
Technische Universität München
Advisor, Dr. Hubert A. Gasteiger
Herbert H. Uhlig Summer Fellowship

*The Colin Garfield Fink Summer Fellowship Award is designed to assist a postdoctoral scientist or engineer in the pursuit of battery research during the summer months.

Look for more information in November 2016 for your chance to apply for one of these prestigious fellowships in 2017!

Interested in other ECS opportunities like these? Click here to learn about additional ECS programs!

Is ECS a fundamental part of your professional life? Do you plan on remaining involved with the ECS for years to come? If so, commit to the ECS for the long haul! Consider lifetime membership today!

ECS offers different membership plans to meet the needs of individuals in academia, industry, and government. The lifetime membership option is designed for individuals who wish to become ECS members for their entire lives.

The lifetime membership is a one-time payment for your Society dues and a one-time payment for your division dues. Pricing for lifetime membership dues will vary. Contact customerservice@electrochem.org to inquire about a lifetime membership quote.

***For your convenience, we can accept installment payments for lifetime membership.***

As a lifetime member, you will receive all of the benefits of ECS membership, including 100 free full-text downloads from the ECS Digital Library, discounts on meeting registrations, unlimited electronic access to ECS meeting abstracts, and a subscription to Interface, our quarterly membership magazine. Once a year, you will receive an inquiry from ECS to confirm your contact information. This is simply to keep our records up-to-date.

Avoid the inconveniences of yearly renewals and fluctuating membership prices. Pay once and become an ECS member for life!

If lifetime membership isn’t for you, check out our multi-year membership options!

While we may have a good understanding of battery application and potential, we still lack a great deal of knowledge about what is actually happening inside a battery cell during cycles. In an effort to build a better battery, ECS members from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory have made a novel development to improve battery performance testing.

Future of energy

The team’s work focuses on the design and placement of the reference electrode (RE), which measure voltage of the individual electrodes making up a battery cell, to enhance the quality of information collected from lithium-ion battery cells during cycles. By improving our knowledge of what’s happening inside the battery, researchers will more easily be able to develop longer-lasting batteries.

“Such information is critical, especially when developing batteries for larger-scale applications, such as electric vehicles, that have far greater energy density and longevity requirements than typical batteries in cell phones and laptop computers,” said Daniel Abraham, ECS member and co-author of the newly published study in the Journal of The Electrochemical Society. “This kind of detailed information provides insight into a battery cell’s health; it’s the type of information that researchers need to evaluate battery materials at all stages of their development.”

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Edward Goodrich Acheson (1856-1931), one of the charter members of ECS, is best known for having invented and commercialized carborundum, an artificial graphite.

Biography

Acheson was born in southwestern Pennsylvania and raised its coal fields. At the age of 16, after his father died, he left school to help support his family. Nevertheless, Acheson devoted his nights to the scientific endeavors, especially electrical experiments.

In 1880, Acheson attempted to sell a battery of his own invention to Thomas Edison, who ended up hiring him to assist with his research. He experimented with creating a conducting carbon that Edison could use in his electric light bulbs.

After working for Edison for four years, Acheson left his employ to become an independent inventor. In 1891, Acheson acquired access to an electric
generating plant and attempted to use electric heat to impregnate clay with carbon. What resulted from this experiment was his discovery of a crystalline substance that had value as an abrasive, which Acheson named “carborundum” (also known as silicon carbide).

In 1894, he established the Carborundum Company in Monongahela City, Pennsylvania, which created grinding wheels, whet stones, knife sharpeners, and powdered abrasives. Later, Acheson used his electric furnace to produce artificial graphite, which  he commercialized, discovering that various organic substances allowed colloidal suspension of particles of graphite mixed in oil or water.

Acheson received 70 patents related to abrasives, graphite products, reduction of oxides, and refractories. ECS awarded him the first Acheson Award, named in his honor, in 1931.

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Attention all current and prospective ECS members!

The days of expiration date anxiety and manual renewal hassle are officially behind us! Our automatic membership renewal system is up and running!

Here at the ECS, we are committed to making membership beneficial and convenient. We want you, our highly valued members, to be able to enjoy the rewards of ECS membership without experiencing the slightest modicum of excess stress.

So let us handle membership renewal for you. Please. We insist!

Enroll now in our automatic renewal system and fret no more about membership expiration dates and manual renewals. Let us make your life easier. Lessen your load to free yourself up and focus on what really matters to you as an ECS member: learning, collaborating, innovating, achieving, and freeing the science.

Want to set up your membership to renew automatically?

Step 1: Login and click My Account.
Step 2: Select My Memberships from the My Account Links menu.
Step 3: In your active membership, click Enroll Now and follow steps for setup.

It’s that easy!

Questions? Contact customerservice@electrochem.org or call 609.737.1902 x100.