The support of PIER gave me the opportunity to present the first results of my PhD project at DESY NanoLab at the Material Research Society’s Fall Meeting 2019 in Boston. The conference is held at the Hynes Convention centre in Back Bay Boston, a beautiful 19th century neighbourhood with lots of museums and restaurants, only a few subway stations away from the city centre. Being one of the largest material science conferences with about 6000 participants, MRS fall meetings includes symposia dedicated to a broad range of topics like photonics, energy conversion, semiconductors or biomaterials but also to technical concepts like computing, simulation or characterisation methods. The scientific program of MRS is complemented by social activities like career talks and an industry exhibition. The latter turned out to be surprisingly useful, as devices were presented I had only read about before.

The session about material characterisation with neutrons in which my talk about the investigation of cation diffusion in magnetite by neutron reflectivity was featured started with a day of very helpful tutorials by the organisers. From the talks, posters and discussions of this comparatively small session, I learned a lot about the capabilities of neutron scattering and innovative ways of data evaluation.
The huge number of symposia, parallel sessions and posters required some planning, but I was able to see many interesting talks about transport, crystal defects, x-ray methods catalysis and nanostructures, fields that are in one way or another connected to my work at DESY NanoLab. Especially the daily poster sessions provided a good opportunity to see new techniques and discuss with other PhD students.

Attending MRS Fall Meeting was a great opportunity to see some of the latest developments in material science, get new perspectives on topics related to my work and to meet people working in related fields. Given the broad scope and the high number of parallel sessions, MRS Fall Meetings offer an exhaustive number of interesting talks for the whole week of the conference.
I would like to express my thanks to PIER and DESY NanoLab for the supporting the trip to MRS.

Steffen Tober, June 2020