VSB-Technical University of Ostrava will be represented at this year’s prestigious Global Summit and Expo on Graphene and 2D Materials (2DMAT2021), taking place from 23 to 25 August in Paris. The opening plenary lecture will be given by Radek Zbořil from the Centre for Energy and Environmental Technologies. The physical chemist is the only representative from Eastern Europe in the plenary lecture section. He will be joined by Nobel Prize winner for the discovery of graphene Konstantin Novoselov and other key players in the world of two-dimensional materials research from the USA, Singapore, Japan, the UK, China and other countries.
“I appreciate the opportunity to open my lecture at such an important congress. In it, I will try to review more than a decade of research on the properties and applications of graphene and its derivatives. A significant part of my presentation will be devoted to the results achieved at the Nanotechnology Centre at VŠB-TUO within the framework of the EXPRO basic research excellence grant project of the Czech Grant Agency. I will talk, for example, about the use of graphene for the removal of heavy metals from water (ACS Nano 2021) or for the development of antimicrobial composites that prevent the emergence of bacterial resistance (Advanced Science 2021, Nature Nanotechnology 2018),” said Radek Zbořil. In his talk, he will outline the possibilities of covalent functionalization of graphene for applications in industry, magnetism, biomedicine, catalysis or environmental technologies.
The 2DMAT2021 Global Summit and Exhibition is a crucial platform for the exchange of the latest developments in graphene and 2D materials research. The scientific programme consists of plenary lectures, keynote and invited talks, parallel sessions as well as poster sessions for young scientists. Among the 19 plenary speakers are several representatives from the prestigious list of the world’s most highly cited researchers, published annually by the US-based Clarivate Analytics, as well as a number of editors of the world’s major nanomaterials journals.
Graphene is a two-dimensional material consisting of a single layer of carbon atoms that is tens of thousands of times thinner than a human hair. Graphene has a number of extraordinary properties. It conducts heat better than any other material known to date and is an electrical conductor better than copper. Given its light weight and unique properties, it is one of the most promising materials for the 21st century.
Radek Zbořil has been contributing to the development of a number of new materials derived from graphene. For example, he was behind the discovery of the thinnest known insulator, non-metallic carbon magnets based on graphene (ACS Nano 2018, Nature Communications 2017), the first two-dimensional carboxylic acid (ACS Nano 2017) or unique catalysts at the single atom level (Advanced Materials). In addition to two-dimensional materials, he has also contributed to the development of a number of other low-dimensional nanosystems, such as one-dimensional non-metallic conductors (Nature Nanotechnology 2020) or a new class of 0D carbon quantum dots applicable in medical diagnostics and therapeutics (ACS Nano 2021, Advanced Materials 2018).