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!

In early December of 2015, Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) penned what he deemed the “Wastebook” – a report detailing what the senator believes to be wasteful federal spending, specifically targeted at research dollars.

The report took aim at research the fiscal conservative considered a waste of federal cash, including projects he summed up as a “shrimp fight club,” a study of cows in China, an exploration of why obese women can’t get dates, and a look at shrimp on a treadmill.

Earlier this month, those very same scientists that Flake criticized and reduced their research to mere waste took to Pennsylvania Avenue to reinforce the legitimacy of their work.

Researchers respond

“I am rock solid about my research. I know it is very good,” said Sheila Patek, an associate professor of biology at Duke University who led the so-called shrimp fight club study. “But this ‘Wastebook’ targeted a short paper that was the first paper in my young graduate student’s career. He is from a long line of firefighters. His father, his uncle, his grandfather. There aren’t any other scientists in his family. They are very proud of him. He is extremely civic-minded. I don’t think I’ve had anyone in my lab like that. And this has been crushing for him.”

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There may soon be a shift in the transportation sector, where traditional fossil fuel-powered vehicles become a thing of the past and electric vehicles start on their rise to dominance.

In fact, we may be seeing that shift already. Last year, battery prices fell 35 percent, which contributed to the 60 percent increase in sales of electric vehicles. If that growth continues along the same path, electric vehicles have the potential to displace oil demand of two million barrels a day as early as 2023.

The key technology at the heart of these vehicles is energy storage. Whether it be the lithium-ion, lithium-air, or fuel cells – electric vehicles depend on affordable, highly efficient electrochemical energy storage to operate.

But what if the future of these vehicles depend on a different type of energy technology?

Saturday Night Live recently made a play on the future of electric vehicles by imagining a world where cars didn’t run off of a singular, efficient battery — but rather tons of AA batteries.

Check out what a car powered entirely out of AA batteries could look like.

Michael Shur will be awarded the 2016 ECS Electronics and Photonics Division Award at the 229th ECS Meeting in San Diego, CA, May 29-June 2, 2016.

Michael Shur has received degrees from St. Petersburg Electrochemical University and the A. F. Ioffe Institute. Currently, he is the Patricia W. and C. Roberts Professor of Solid State Electronics and the Director of the Broadband Center at the Rensselar Polytechnic Institute. Additionally, Shur is the co-founder and vice president of SET, Inc.

Shur is an ECS Fellow and has been named a Fellow of many other scientific societies, including IEEE, OSA, SPIE, IET, APS, WIF, MRS, and AAAS.

(MORE: Read his award address abstract entitled, “High Power Nitride Based Field Effect Transistors.”)

His many honors and recognitions include the Tibbetts Award for technology commercialization, IEEE Donald Fink Award, IEEE Kirchmayer Award, Gold Medal of Russian Education Ministry, RPI Research Award, and many more. Shur is also a foreign member of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences.

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Michael Faraday may have suggested that the formula for scientific success is “work, finish, publish,” but Faraday said that back in the 19th century. In 2016, there are plenty of compelling reasons to tack another item onto the end of the list. Millions of scientific articles are published each year, making your work just a drop in the ocean (and we have authors who do a lot of work). In order to ensure that your work is read, cited, and has impact, it’s becoming increasingly necessary to add a little self-promotion to your workflow.

To help you get started we have a few suggestions – here are ECS’s top 5 tips to maximize impact and promote your published research.

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Open access continues to gain momentum globally

Globally, open access can help create a world where everyone from the student in Atlanta to a researcher in Haiti can freely read the scientific papers they need to make a discovery; where scientific breakthroughs in energy conversion, sensors, or nanotechnology are unimpeded by fees to access or publish research.

The global open access effort aims to break down barriers and make online scholarly information free to everyone, promote the global exchange of scientific discoveries, and open the door to the faster development of practical applications that could address some of the world’s most pressing issues.

(READ: “Robert Savinell on Preserving Scientific Research“)

Accelerating discovery in Africa

Recently, Senegal started building this framework for African countries that often lack access to scientific and education information. During April’s Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa, representatives from the west-African country decided to begin the process to ensure the establishment of a national open access policy, making them the first African country to establish such a policy.

Leaders hope this new policy will encourage the creation of open platforms free and accessible for all researchers, innovators, teachers, students, media professionals, and the public and will encourage collaboration, production, dissemination, and knowledge economies.

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HIV and hepatitis C are among the leading causes of worldwide death. According to amfAR, an organization dedicated to eradicating the spread of HIV/AIDS through innovative research, nearly 37 million people are currently living with HIV. Of those 37 million, one third become co-infected with hepatitis C.

The threat of HIV and hepatitis C

The regions hit the hardest by this co-infection tend to be developing parts of the world, such as sub-Saharan Africa and Central and East Asia.

While these developing regions have measures to diagnosis HIV and hepatitis C, the rapid point-of-care tests used are typically unaffordable or unreliable.

An electrochemical solution

A group from McGill University is looking to change that with a recently developed, paper-based electrochemical platform with multiplexing and telemedicine capabilities that may enable low-cost, point-of-care diagnosis for HIV and hepatitis C co-infections within serum samples.

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ECS is sponsoring the 11th European Space Power Conference, taking place October 3-7, 2016 in Thessaloniki, Greece. The conference, which will focus on electrical power for space applications and cutting-edge research on topics for terrestrial applicators, is currently open for potential presenters to submit their papers.

Following several issues, some related to browsers compatibility and companies systems configuration, we know that some authors were not able to upload their digest. In addition, some digests have not been submitted in the appropriate format as per instructions, being an abstract instead of a digest.

In view of these issues, the ESPC2016 committee has decided to re-open a window: from Friday 22/04/2016 18:00 CET till Monday 25/04/2016 12:00 CET.

Upload your digest before April 22, 2016!

The conference is intended to cover the three main topics of: power generation with solar generators and other types of sources, such as nuclear or electrochemical; energy storage, including batteries and regenerative fuel cells; and power management and distribution, a wide domain covering every level of integration from electrical parts to power subsystem architectures.

If you are not able to login to ESPC2016 digest submission website, the ESPC2016 committee recommends to use another browser.

Learn more about the conference and email espc2016-conference@esa.int for questions or support.

Image: Antalexion

With the increasing popularity of solar power and ongoing dialogue about the effects of climate changes comes inevitable discussions about the viability of renewable energy. While efficiency levels have grown tremendously over the years, many still worry about the feasibility of solar panels during inclement weather when the sun is not shining its brightest.

To address that issue, more attention has been focused on energy storage. However, a group of Chinese scientists are turning to the solar panels themselves to answer some of these questions.

In a recently published paper, scientist detailed a new way for solar panels to produce electricity from rain water. The way it works is pretty simple: researchers apply a thin layer of graphene to the bottom of the solar panel; when it rains, you simply flip the panel and allow the positively charged ions from the rain drops to interact with the graphene and produce electricity.

“Although great achievements have been made since the discovery of various solar cells, there is still a remaining problem that the currently known solar cells can only be excited by sunlight on sunny days,” wrote the researchers in the paper.

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