San Diego, California, United States
PROGRAM: Materials Science & Engineering

I had the opportunity to attend the 2019 Fall National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS) in San Diego, California. The theme of this meeting was centered around chemistry and water, particularly access to clean water and how chemistry could create more accessible routes to water purification and desalination. My area of research centers primarily around polymers, which have seen widespread use as next-generation desalination membranes for water treatment. While this meeting’s theme focused on water purification, there was a diverse range of topics at the meeting, especially in the section focused on polymer chemistry and engineering that I primarily attended. Many of the talks I attended centered around my interest in nanocomposites, polymeric materials that contain nanoparticles as a means of increasing bulk mechanical properties or inducing some stimuli responsive behavior, and polymer self-assembly, which relies on non-covalent interactions between molecules to build a diverse set of architectures in both solution and solid-state systems.

My own talk centered around my work that was completed and published in the last year at a session of talks that centered around toughening materials through molecular design. I had the opportunity to share the design principle in my own self-assembled polymer networks and how these assemblies could be controlled through overlaying a second, tightly crosslinked elastic network. Beyond having the opportunity to share my work, I was able to meet and connect with other researchers in my field during intermissions between talks and at networking events held around the city. Overall, this ACS conference helped me to understand how to more effectively share my research with a broad audience as well as offered me multiple opportunities to network with colleagues that shared my interests.