Documents from the 5th WMRIF Meeting

12-15 May 2013, EMPA, Dübendorf and St. Gallen, Switzerland

Excellently supported by staff of the Swiss EMPA the 5th WMRIF General Assembly was held at Dübendorf and accompanied by the symposium Materials meet Life in St. Gallen, Switzerland.

5th WMRIF General Assembly

The WMRIF General Assembly welcomed Dr. William Goldstein Deputy Director for Science and Technology of the US Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as new Vice-President of WMRIF in the Presidential Board. Dr. Laurie Locascio, Director of the Materials Measurement Laboratory of the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, and Prof. Dr. Gian-Luca Bona, CEO of the Swiss Empa were welcomed as Guests to the Presidential Board.

Los Alamos National Laboratory (USA) and CanmetMATERIALS (Canada) were accepted as 49thand 50th member of WMRIF.

The General Assembly discussed a strategy paper 10 Trends in Materials Science and Technology, presented by WMRIF-President, Prof. Böllinghaus. Upon the comments from the General Assembly it will be refined and made available on this website.

Round table discussions were introduced by experts in these fields and went into details on four themes:

1. Challenges and benefit of cooperation/merging of institutes
   Moderator: Prof. S. Ushioda (NIMS)
2. Quality criteria of scientific output
   Moderator: Dr. Goldstein (LLNL)
3. Knowledge and technology transfer to industry
   Moderator: Prof. S. B. Kang (KIMS)
4. Transfer of scientific results to policy making
   Moderator: Dr. Lexow (BAM)

Some of the ideas presented may be summarized with the statements:

• In merging institutes critical size (if small) and manageability (if big) have to be of major relevance.
• Cooperation is essential for benefitting from complementary capabilities.
• Transfer of results from research to industry and application is essential.
• Statistics showing (peer reviewed) number of publications are valuable but not sufficient for the assessment of the quality and success of work.
• Value and influence of research has also to be assessed in personalized interviews, feedback from industry and other potential users of research results, number of patents and backflow of resources via licensing.

 Forthcoming events are:

4th Young Materials Scientist Workshop, July 2014, NIST, USA
6th WMRIF General Assembly and Symposium, May/June 2015, LLNL, USA
5th Young Materials Scientists Workshop, Asia or Europe
7th WMRIF General Assembly and Symposium, Asia

 Symposium Materials meet Life

 The symposium Materials meet Life focused on four major themes:

1. Materials challenges for protection – Environment and Health
2. Sensors and body surveillance
3. Implants and drug delivery
4. Materials safety and risk assessment

As can be expected from a symposium of a materials forum the lectures highlighted the materials issues, here in the context of interaction with the living environment. Particular attention was given to needs for standardization, reference materials and reference procedures, summarizing the topics included:

• From Microfluidics to Macro-Implants
• From Tissue-Regeneration to artificial Skin
• From Nanomaterials to Environmental Questions
• Standardization
• Reference Materials
• Reference Methods
• New Techniques (Dip Coating, Inkjet Printing of Tissue)
• Modelling of Biological Systems
• Sensing and Diagnosis

More details are given in the Book of abstracts (PDF, 0.5 MB) and the Programme including links to publicly available presentations.