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The Graphene Flagship has dedicated a considerable amount of time and resource to develop a safe approach to use and handle graphene and related materials. By integrating this approach at every level the Graphene Flagship aims to engineer out risks

With its exceptional scientific programme Graphene Week 2016 is the highlight of the European graphene conference calendar. This is the first in a series of interviews with the invited speakers, giving us a unique preview of their talks.

The Graphene Flagship is pleased to announce the inaugural Graphene Innovation Forum taking place during Graphene Week 2016 which will focus on the three exciting and important areas of graphene road mapping, commercialisation and standardisation.

The Graphene Flagship announced today the addition of four exciting new sessions to the Graphene Week programme. These sessions, included in the conference fee, centre around the idea that for Graphene and other 2D materials to fulfil their potential, researchers have to be equipped with the skills needed to transfer their technology out of the laboratory.

Graphene Connect is a series of workshops born out of the basic principle of the Graphene Flagship – to take Graphene out of the academic laboratory and into society. The workshops help to make the connections and introductions that are needed to allow graphene to fulfil it potential by bridging the gap between academia and industry. Graphene Connect is also focused on creating this ecosystem within Europe – to really create a whole value chain that will enable Europe, the birth place of graphene, to reap its rewards.

In February 2016 the Graphene Flagship presented the inaugural Graphene Pavilion at the Mobile World Congress (MWC), the world's largest gathering for the mobile industry with over 100,000 attendees and 2000 exhibitors in Barcelona, Spain. This event, coordinated by the Graphene Flagship and ICFO with support from the GSMA, was a huge success.

​In October 2013 the European Commission as part of its Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) scheme launched the Graphene Flagship. This large scale, international research collaboration is moving forward to the core of its mission

The activities of all the Flagship partners are too numerous to list in this brief overview. Instead we highlight eight notable achievements from the ramp-up phase all of which have featured in the mainstream media.

Imagine a world where you can tailor the properties of graphene to have the outcome you desire. By combining its unique properties with the precision of molecular chemistry, scientists from the Graphene Flagship have taken the first steps towards doing just that. In their paper published on 7th April in Nature Communications an international group of Flagship scientists show how it is possible to create light-responsive graphene-based devices, paving the way for many applications including photo sensors and even optically controllable memories.

In the first study of its kind, researchers from the Graphene Flagship show that the same ultra-low friction that is well known to occur between sheets of graphene also occurs between graphene and other surfaces. The work, published in Science (1), and led by physicists at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research at Mainz (Prof. Klaus Müllen), the Technical University Dresden (Dr. Andrea Benassi, Prof. Xinliang Feng), EMPA Zurich (Prof. Roman Fasel) and the University of Basel (Prof. Ernst Meyer) opens up the possibility of frictionless coatings.

The fourth and final day of the Graphene Pavilion was as busy as ever. This was also the day that graphene was featured in the MWC conference programme.

The Graphene Pavilion has gone from strength to strength during the MWC. As day three progressed the level of media interest and number of visitors continued to intensify, taking everyone a little by surprise. All of the exhibitors worked hard to keep up with demand - overall an excellent outcome!

​Welcome to the Graphene Pavilion, it is a pretty exciting place!

It has been an exciting first day in the inaugural Graphene Pavilion at the 2016 Mobile World Congress. With a stream of visitors from the public and press it truly was an intense and rewarding day. The Graphene Pavilion represents a new way to present graphene to the wider world. As a newcomer to the MWC the Graphene Pavilion attracted interest for a wide range of reasons. Some visitors were already familiar with graphene and wanted to know more, some were interested in a particular technology such as batteries or flexible displays and wanted to know how graphene can integrate with these and there were those who were simply drawn in to discover something new - like the school teacher looking for new things to teach his pupils.