SRM University-AP hosted a national conference on “Status and Opportunities in Functional Energy and Electronic Materials” (SOFEEM-2024) on March 02-03, 2024. The conference was organised by the Department of Physics and was supported by the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India. The conference brought together about 100 participants from various reputed institutions, national laboratories, and universities from India. They shared their research outcomes and discussed the various frontier energy technologies and smart electronic devices.

The main theme of the conference was to boost the development and optimal use of renewable energy and to promote sustainable energy and intelligent electronics. The conference focused on fostering collaboration among researchers and practitioners to explore cutting-edge developments in these domains and pave the way for innovative solutions. A diverse array of topics was covered, including:

• Synthesis and processing of novel energy and electronic materials
• Modelling of low-dimensional materials
• Materials and catalysts for green hydrogen production
• Electrolyte and electrode materials for high-performance batteries and fuel cells
• Functional materials for supercapacitors
• Device fabrication using novel energy materials for energy conversion and storage
• Low-dimensional materials in electronics and photonics

The conference was inaugurated by Prof. Manoj K Arora, Vice Chancellor, who welcomed the guests and the delegates and highlighted the university’s achievements and vision. He also emphasised the importance of interdisciplinary research and innovation in addressing the global energy and environment challenges.

The conference featured keynote lectures, invited talks, oral presentations, and poster sessions by experts and young researchers. Distinguished Keynote speakers from IIT Madras, along with Invited speakers from prestigious institutions such as the Indian Institute of Science (IISC) Bangalore, IIT Tirupati, IIT Hyderabad, University of Hyderabad, IISER Bhopal, and the CSIR – Central Electrochemical Research Institute (CECRI) in Tamil Nadu, among others from esteemed state universities, shared their groundbreaking research. The conference provided a good platform for the participants to interact with the eminent researchers to enrich and share their knowledge in their respective fields of research and engage in potential collaboration to develop innovative technologies in the areas of sustainable energy, advances in materials research and computational sciences. In addition, research scholars from nearby universities (such as VIT-AP, Vignan University, Acharya Nagarjuna University, and SRM-IST) participated in the conference and showcased their current research works.

The conference concluded with awards for the best poster and oral presentation by research scholars, celebrating their significant contributions to the field. The conference concluded with a valedictory session, where the best oral and poster presentations were awarded, and feedback from the participants was collected. The conference was well-received by the attendees, who appreciated the quality and diversity of the scientific discussions, as well as the university’s hospitality and facilities.

The third chapter of the biennial International Conference on Materials Genome (ICMG) was inaugurated at SRM University-AP, India on February 22, 2024, in the august presence of Prof G P Das, Research Institute for Sustainable Energy, India, Prof Yoshiyuki Kawazoe, Tohoku University, Japan, Prof Puru Jena, Virginia Commonwealth University, USA, Prof Jer Lai Kuo, Dr R Premkumar, Registrar, SRM University AP, Prof Ranjit Thapa, Dean-Research, Dr Pranab Mandal, Associate Professor & Head of the Department, Physics, Dr Mahesh Ravva, Associate Professor, Chemistry, Dr Pradyut Kumar Sanki, Associate Professor, Electronics and Communication Engineering and 150+ dignitaries across the world.

ICMG is set up to nurture and promote research and development activities in computational materials in association with Asian Consortium on Computational Materials Science (ACCMS), Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bangalore (JNCASR), National Chemical Laboratory, Pune (NCL), Virginia Commonwealth University, USA, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT-M), Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT-B), TCG-Crest, Kolkata.

In his inaugural speech, Dr R Premkumar delved into the vision of SRM University-AP as a new-age research-centric university. Within 7 years of inception, SRM University-AP proudly harbours 20 departments across 3 schools, providing education to 8500 students. The university aspires to bring quality education to 15000 students in the near future. The research environment of the university is no less than excellent. The university strives to contribute to society through outstanding research activities. The premier faculty pool of the university with 100% PhD and international academic and industry exposure and the zeal to do quality research makes it a chosen haven for achievers. SRM University-AP supports its faculty and students in research by providing Seed Funding, Research Grants, Financial Assistance for Publications and Patents, Conference Aids and state-of-the-art research facilities. “The university’s mission is to create a newer generation who could substantially contribute to the academia and industry. Hence, we encourage our students with equal importance to take entrepreneurship, higher studies and/or Placement support as their future endeavours”, said Dr R Premkumar.

In his keynote speech, Prof. G P Das congratulated the University for the successful arrangement of the 3rd International Conference on Materials Genome. In the year 2000, the Asian consortium was born from a tea table discussion and has come a long way since. This consortium has become 25 years old, and they have been utilizing human as well as computational resources in different countries in the Asian region. The year 2024 marks the 60th year of the two most important milestone developments in the field of materials simulation – (i) Density Functional Theory by Walter Kohn and (ii) the landmark paper by Aneesur Rahman who is considered the founding father of computer simulation and molecular dynamics. It is exciting to note how the research in this domain has evolved in the years between. “One of the most recent additions to this is the marriage between materials science and computer science. This is also termed materials informatics or materials genomics. Big data, deep neural networks, reinforcement learning etc. are becoming more and more familiar tools for materials physicists and chemists. An increasingly large number of papers are appearing in the most prestigious peer-reviewed journals on the data-centric approach to discover as well as predict novel energy materials, catalytic materials, magnetic & spintronic materials, various kinds of functional materials and more recently topological materials,” asserted Prof Das.

Prof. Das further emphasised that there are a large number of areas that are being investigated with the aid of modern technologies like AI-ML. For example, the space group of a complex geological sample can be predicted just by looking at its X-ray or Neutron diffraction data using deep neural networks which was conventionally used to be done by Rietveld analysis, but now such inverse problems can be dealt with AI-ML. Such data-centric pattern-recognition approaches and their triumphs in predicting the behaviour of hitherto unknown areas e.g. cryptography, agriculture, and even criminology open up a bright new future ahead of us. Prof. Das concluded his speech by reminding us that we are now far ahead of our conventional ways of studying. The emerging ‘interface areas’ between disciplines such as biology and physics, economics & physics, metallurgy & physics, electronics & physics, mathematics & statistics, and many other suggests an enormous leap in computational approaches with advances in experimental measurements.

The Sub-themes of the conference for this year are Quantum Mechanics/Machine Learning Approach, High-throughput Computation and Machine Learning aided discovery of Materials, on which 6 keynote speeches and 46 invited lectures will be delivered in the coming 3 days. It is indeed heartening to see the conglomeration of so many stalwarts covering broad areas in Physics, Chemistry and Materials Science.