Yury Gogotsi was a chemist from the very beginning. He feels the excitement of scientific discovery, and cannot imagine doing anything else. It was love at first sight for Yury Gogotsi. 

Gogotsi feels that the greatest recent step in the field of materials science was the discovery of new 2D materials, the “building blocks of the future”. He is very enthusiastic about the use of nanotechnology to generate “new artificial materials, structures and devices from nanoscale building blocks” and the increased application of “modeling, simulation, and machine learning for solving materials science problems”, though he admits concern regarding the unknown effects that artificial intelligence will have on our future lives. He is also conscious of the energy required for computation and the importance of exploiting renewable resources to develop new technologies – ones that reduce energy consumption. “We need revolutionary discoveries here,” he says. “Evolutionary development won’t be enough.”

NANO2DAY project participants from the Materials Research Center (MRC), Kiev, Ukraine, Alexey Gogotsi (MRC project leader) and Veronika Zahorodna (early-staged researcher, in the framework of international scientific cooperation on the Horizon 2020 program, visited the partner organization Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA, on September-October 2018 in accordance with the travel plan on the project to perform planned project activities.

Director of Materials Research Centre (Kiev, Ukraine) Oleksiy Gogotsi  at the work meeting in Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA, made a  presentation of the company and its activitties in international research and development projects. Also Oleksiy Gogotsi presented HORIZON 2020 MSCA RISE Project №777810 NANO2DAY: MULTIFUNCTIONAL POLYMER COMPOSITES DOPED WITH NOVEL 2D NANOPARTICLES FOR ADVANCED APPLICATIONS.

During NANO2DAY project visit  to Drexel University (Philadelphia, USA), director of Materials Research Centre (kiev, Ukraine) Oleksiy Gogotsi met with Assoc. Prof. Zdeněk Sofer from University of Chemistry and Technology, Prague (Chech Republic) and attended his seminar on nanomaterials. Prof. Zdenek Sofer in Drexel University gave an excellent seminar on 2D Materials Beyond Graphene.

Due to the NANO2DAY project under european scientific  research program HORIZON 2020 research scientist  Maksym Plakhothyuk, Technical University of Denmark (DTU), visited Ukrainian partner Materials Research Centre, Kiev, Ukraine on September-November 2018. 

China"s Government Friendship Award ceremony was held in Great Hall of the People, in Beijing on September 29, 2018, the award to the winners were presented by the Vice Premier of China Liu He. The People's Republic of China Government Friendship Award is China's highest award for foreign experts who have made outstanding contributions to the country's economic and social progress.

Now, researchers at Drexel University have developed a method for creating nearly invisible antennas on almost any surface by literally spraying them on like paint. The antennas are made from a special two-dimensional metallic material called MXene. MXene powder can be dissolved in water to create a paint that is then airbrushed on. In tests, even a layer as thin as just 62 nanometers – thousands of times thinner than a sheet of paper – could communicate effectively. Performance maxed out at just 8 microns, a point at which the spray-on antennas worked just as well as those currently used in mobile devices and wireless routers.

This designation celebrates researchers whose influence is comparable to that of Nobel Prize recipients, as attested by exceptionally high citation records within the Web of Science. 

Yalta European Strategy (YES)  introduced nightcap events for the participants of the 15th YES Annual Meeting to wind down at the end of the first conference day and discuss interesting topics in an informal atmosphere. YES invited leading politicians, opinion makers and business leaders to present their views on modern trends that define the world and Ukraine. The nightcaps were organized in partnership with the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine and America House, International Renaissance Foundation, Ukrainian-Jewish Encounter and the Atlantic Council, Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar people and Ministry of Information Policy of Ukraine, Western NIS Enterprise Fund and Embassy of the Republic of Estonia.

At the poster session of the conference Oleksiy Gogotsi presented two poster presentations on advanced nanomaterials for different applications, prepared with colleagues from Drexel University, USA, and Jilin University, China

NANO2DAY project participants from Materials Research Centre, Kiev, Ukraine, MRC director and project leader Oleksiy Gogotsi and ESR Veronika Zahorodna are working in Polymer Institute, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava, Slovakia under the project secondments plan.

Professor Omastova was acquainted with the activities and research infrastructure of MRC project partner, she held several seminars on polymer composites and talked about the experience and developments of her institute. 

The 6th International Conference “Novel Functional Carbon Nanomaterials”within the 8th Forum on New Materials at CIMTEC 2018 held in Perugia, Italy,  highlighted recent achievements and challenges in the synthesis, structural control and modeling at the meso- and nano-scales of the variety of low-dimensional carbon allotropes including nanodiamonds, diamond-like carbon, fullerenes, nanotubes, graphene and graphene-related structures, as well as high surface area carbon networks, which are promising for a range of emerging applications in energy conversion and storage, water purification, high-speed nanoelectronics, optoelectronics, photonics, quantum information processing, quantum computing, biosensing, drug delivery, medical imaging, thermal management, catalysis, lubrication, etc.

The meeting is the first international conference focusing on MXene materals, which is to bring scientists in the two-dimensional materials or energy area to interact and discuss the advances and challenges in various fields.

On May 14th, 2018, Prof. Yury Gogotsi received an honorary doctorate from the National Technical University of Ukraine “Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute (NTUU “KPI”), Kiev, Ukraine.