New in 2019, we are delighted to continue a series of post-publication online article collections, led by our Community Board members across both Materials Horizons and Nanoscale Horizons.

The Community Boards that support both Horizons journals aim to provide a platform for early career researchers to share their experiences and ideas on scientific publishing. Working together and sharing their unique expertise, our Community Board members have recommended several key topics where significant, rapid progress has been made in the last 2 years. They have selected top articles published in the Horizons journals to showcase the most important advances in each topic area.

Advanced Energy Storage Technologies

Vipin Kumar and Kai Zhu present the third Horizons Community Board Collection:

Horizons Community Board Collection – Advanced Energy Storage Technologies

“The ever-increasing demand for energy has driven the development of energy-storage technologies to go beyond Li-ion batteries. As a consequence, a plethora of advanced energy storage technologies have emerged in recent years, for instance Li-S, Na-air, and Zn-air, as well as other flexible/wearable supercapacitors. Li-S batteries promise ultra-high energy density (e.g., many-fold higher than that of commercial Li-ion batteries), while the next-generation supercapacitors offer improved performance with additional functionality and could be a potential contender for future energy intensive applications.

This themed collection compiles recent research and review articles focused mainly on electrochemical energy storage using batteries, i.e., post Li-ion batteries, and flexible/wearable supercapacitors beyond H-ion and Li-ion. These reports show that the high performance energy storage solutions are urgently required to satisfy the growing demand for portable energy. We hope that this themed collection will provide valuable information to the readers, and could help to drive future developments in the field of energy storage.”

Vipin Kumar and Kai Zhu

Guest Editors

Materials Horizons Community Board member Dr Vipin Kumar received his PhD in Materials Science from School of Materials Science and Engineering in NTU Singapore in 2016. He then worked as a research fellow from 2016 to 2017 in NTU Singapore. He was awarded Inspire Faculty Award, from Department of Science & Technology (DST) India in 2017. He moved to Agency for Science Technology and Research (A*STAR) Singapore in 2017, and worked as a Scientist for nearly 2 years. He is currently working as Assistant Professor in Indian Institute of Technology, Bhubaneswar (IIT BBS), India. He has contributed in various research projects, including electrochemical energy storage using oxide-nanomaterials, miniaturized gas sensors devices based on nanowires and nanosheets assembly, and alkali metal anodes for high performance batteries. His current research interests lie in electrochemical energy storage using metal-sulfur batteries (e.g., Na-S), and flexible and stretchable chemical vapour sensors based on layered materials for environmental applications.

Materials Horizons Community Board member Dr Kai Zhu received his Ph.D. from Jilin University, China and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan in 2016. At present, he is an Assistant Professor at College of Material Science and Chemical Engineering, Harbin Engineering University. His research interests mainly focus on design and synthesis of advanced materials for electrochemical energy storage.

We hope you enjoy reading this collection.

See our other Horizons Community Board Collections:

• Nanobiomedicine
• Emerging 2D Materials for Energy and Electronics Applications

New in 2019, we are delighted to continue a series of post-publication online article collections, led by our Community Board members across both Materials Horizons and Nanoscale Horizons.

The Community Boards that support both Horizons journals aim to provide a platform for early career researchers to share their experiences and ideas on scientific publishing. Working together and sharing their unique expertise, our Community Board members have recommended several key topics where significant, rapid progress has been made in the last 2 years. They have selected top articles published in the Horizons journals to showcase the most important advances in each topic area.

Emerging 2D Materials for Energy and Electronics Applications

Li Li, Tianyi Ma, and Nan Zhang present the second Horizons Community Board Collection:

Horizons Community Board Collection – Emerging 2D Materials for Energy and Electronics Applications

“2D nanomaterials, including carbon-based materials, metal, metal oxide (sulfide), and black phosphorus (BP) et al., have aroused extensive interests in energy and electronics applications due to their attractive structure-dependent properties.

In this themed collection, we are compiling some noteworthy articles focused on sensors, lithium-ion batteries, supercapacitors, photo(electro)catalysis, photodetector, electronics and optoelectronics. As typical 2D carbon materials, graphene and doping graphene exhibit high performance in these fields, as indicated by Li et al. (DOI: 10.1039/C6MH00587J) and Chua et al. (DOI: 10.1039/C7MH00068E) in their research works published in Materials Horizons. 2D metal and metal sulfide materials as illustrated through the research works of Chen et al. (DOI: 10.1039/C7NH00091J) and Li et al. (DOI: 10.1039/C8NH00419F) have shown two-dimensional geometric structure together with unique physical properties, which make the material quite a promising candidate for applications in electronics and optoelectronics. Lou et al. (DOI: 10.1039/C3MH00077J) provided an effective approach with SnO₂ nanosheets to increase the energy density of the integrated electrodes. A review article about 2D BP published by Zhou et al. (DOI: 10.1039/C6MH00358C) summarized the recent developments in the study of BP, which covered the state-of-the-art synthesis methods for preparing single-layer or few-layer BP, the recent advances in characterizing its electronic, optical and mechanical properties, and the reported functional devices utilizing such properties. Since these research works show that these emerging 2D materials have excellent performance and prospect, it will be important to see how they enrich the future of energy and electronics applications.

We hope that readers will obtain valuable information from this themed collection.”

Li Li, Tianyi Ma, and Nan Zhang

Guest Editors

Nanoscale Horizons Community Board Member Dr Li Li received his Ph.D. degree from Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in 2012 and finished his two-year postdoc work in Cornell University in 2014. His current research interests include advanced nanomaterials fabrication technology and its applications for energy storage/conversion. He was awarded with 2015 TMS Yong Leader Professional Development Award and serves in the Royal Society of Chemistry journal Nanoscale Horizons Community Board and Editorial Board of Metallurgical and Materials Transactions.

Materials Horizons Community Board member Dr Tianyi Ma received his PhD in Physical Chemistry in 2013 from Nankai University, China. Then he worked as a postdoctoral research fellow from 2013 to 2014 in University of Adelaide, Australia. He was awarded Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) in 2015, and continued independent research on the rational design of nanostructured materials with a large variety of components from carbons, metals, metal oxides, organic polymers, to metal–organic frameworks. He is currently a lecturer in Discipline of Chemistry, University of Newcastle. His current interest lies on the energy and environment related applications of functional materials including catalysis, adsorption and separation, and energy conversion and storage. He authored more than 100 peer review journal articles in this area with an h-index of 39.

Materials Horizons Community Board member Professor Nan Zhang received her PhD degree in Inorganic Chemistry in 2016 at the State Key Laboratory of Photocatalysis on Energy and Environment, Fuzhou University, China. Then she worked as a postdoctoral research fellow from 2016 to 2017 at National University of Singapore. She was supported by the National Postdoctoral Program for Innovative Talents in 2017 and worked on the optical property optimization of nanostructured metal materials toward the applications in photocatalysis. She is currently a full professor working at College of Materials Science and Engineering, Hunan University, China. Her main research interests include the fabrication of carbon-based composites and metal nanostructures with scattering-mediated optical response for solar energy conversion.

We hope you enjoy reading this collection.

See our other Horizons Community Board Collection: Nanobiomedicine here.

New in 2019, we are delighted to announce a series of post-publication online article collections, led by our Community Board members across both Materials Horizons and Nanoscale Horizons.

The Community Boards that support both Horizons journals aim to provide a platform for early career researchers to share their experiences and ideas on scientific publishing. Working together and sharing their unique expertise, our Community Board members have recommended several key topics where significant, rapid progress has been made in the last 2 years. They have selected top articles published in the Horizons journals to showcase the most important advances in each topic area.

Nanobiomedicine

To kick things off, Chandra Kumar Dixit and Christopher M. Proctor present the first Horizons Community Board Collection:

Horizons Community Board Collection – Nanobiomedicine

“Advancements in nanotechnology are impacting biology and medicine. In this themed collection, we are compiling some noteworthy articles in the areas related to targeted delivery, vaccines, diagnostics, wound healing, and self-healing scaffolds & materials. Theranostics, which is a new branch specifically dealing with point-of-care, involves diagnostics and therapy in a single agent. Carbon-based materials are proving to be effective agents in this quest, as indicated by Kapil Patel et al. in their research published in Materials Horizons (DOI: 10.1039/C8MH00966J). Anand et al. (DOI: 10.1039/C8NH00174J) emphasized in their review article the potential of carbon-based nanomaterials as antimicrobial agents. Scaffolds and matrices based on nanomaterials, as illustrated through the research works of Yu et al. (DOI: 10.1039/C8MH00647D), Singh et al. (DOI: 10.1039/C8MH01298A), Ooi (DOI: 10.1039/C7MH00373K), and Liu (DOI: 10.1039/C8MH00704G) have shown tremendous potential in surgery, wound healing, controlled release skin patches, etc. Given how all of these materials show potential in their respective fields, it will be important to see how these will shape the future of biomedicine. We hope that the readers find this themed collection informative and useful.”

Chandra Kumar Dixit and Christopher M. Proctor

Guest Editors

Chandra Kumar Dixit

Nanoscale Horizons Community Board Member, Chandra Kumar Dixit is a Scientist at Qiagen Sciences working in the areas of IVD and nanodiagnostics. He received a BSc degree in Biology from Bundelkhand University, an MSc degree in Biotechnology from CCS University and was awarded a PhD in Biotechnology from Dublin City University in 2012. His postdoctoral training spanned from Dublin City University, Ireland, Technion IIT, Israel, and University of Connecticut, USA, in areas of microfluidic tools, glycobiology, cell biology, disease diagnosis, electrochemistry, prostate cancer, 3D-printed tools for fluidic devices, and novel nanomaterials. He has published over 40 international research papers including reviews, books, and book chapters in the areas of biosensors, conventional and 3D-printed microfluidics, and disease diagnostics, and has won several international fellowships including the Marie-Curie grant.

Christopher M. Proctor

Materials Horizons Community Board member Christopher M. Proctor received a BSc in Interdisciplinary Physics from the University of Michigan in 2008. Following two years as a general scientist at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, he earned a PhD in Materials from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he investigated loss mechanisms in organic photovoltaics (2015). Subsequently, Chris was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from Whitaker International to develop implantable bioelectronic devices for treating neurological disorders at the Ecole des Mines de St Etienne. He is now a Research Associate and Borysiewicz Biomedical Sciences Fellow at the University of Cambridge where his research is focused on engineering devices and developing materials to enable a seamless connection between electronics and living tissue for applications including epilepsy, cancer and pain management.

We hope you enjoy reading this collection.