News Story

Clark School Hosts PowerMEMS Community

Attendees of the PowerMEMS 2009 conference have a look at the research being conducted in the FabLab, part of the Maryland NanoCenter.

More than 180 international attendees of the 9th International Workshop on Micro and Nanotechnology for Power Generation and Energy Conversion Applications (PowerMEMS 2009) visited six Clark School labs on December 3 as a featured activity of their annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

The multidisciplinary PowerMEMS community includes electrical and mechanical engineers as well as chemists, physicists, and material scientists. They conduct research enabling smaller, higher-capacity, more reliable and portable power technologies for military and consumer electronics and remote sensors. They also improve small-scale thermal management and devise better batteries to propel air vehicles and nano-satellites.

These areas correspond with many of the Clark School's initiatives in energy research. Tours of the Clark School's fuel cell, battery, sensors and actuators, nanotechnology and micro reacting flow laboratories allowed the conference attendees to learn about Clark School projects, see our first-class facilities, interact with our faculty and students and make contacts for future collaborations. The guests also attended a luncheon in the Jeong H. Kim Engineering Building rotunda.

The PowerMEMS 2009 conference was chaired by ISR Director Reza Ghodssi (ECE/ISR). Photos of the lab tours are available here.

Labs toured by the PowerMEMS attendees

• The Advanced Fuel Cell and Battery Lab, led by Chunsheng Wang

• The Center of Fuel Cell Research, headed by Greg Jackson

• The MEMS Sensors and Actuators Lab, directed by Reza Ghodssi

• The Micro Reacting Flow Lab, led by Christopher Cadou

• The Nano-Bio Systems Lab, directed by Gary Rubloff

• The Maryland NanoCenter FabLab, headed by Jim O'Connor

Some of the universities whose faculty members visited the Clark School

• Tokyo University

• Tohoku University

• Seoul National University

• Stanford University

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• University of California-Berkeley

• Georgia Institute of Technology

• Imperial College London

• Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

• Freiburg University

University of Maryland units supporting the conference

• The Office of the Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost

• The University of Maryland Division of Research

• The A. James Clark School of Engineering

• The Institute for Systems Research

• The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

• The University of Maryland Energy Research Center

• The Maryland NanoCenter

December 10, 2009