Great success for leading virtual Graphene Flagship conference

Graphene For is the Graphene Flagship's new virtual event series. This series is part of our venture to introduce more digital events to our established portfolio of in-person events, to enable wide-reaching and accessible participation throughout these difficult times and beyond.

Therefore, in light of the ongoing pandemic and the postponing of Graphene Week to 2021, the Graphene Flagship have endeavoured to overcome these challenges and create a great opportunity for researchers and innovators from around Europe and beyond to get involved with the Graphene Flagship. On 24–26 September, we hosted the Graphene For Research, Innovation, Collaboration virtual event, the third event in the Graphene For series.  

Now, we are proud to report that the event enjoyed excellent levels of engagement on all fronts, with over 800 attendees and 57 speakers across 16 unique and engaging sessions. These statistics, in addition to the results from our survey – described below – show that the graphene community have recognised the quality, success and value of our digital events.

The three days each focused on one of the core facets of the Graphene Flagship: Research, Innovation and Collaboration.

The first day focused on forging connections with cutting-edge research, and featured keynote speaker Philip Kim from Harvard University, a world leading materials scientist who spoke about the exciting potential of graphene and layered materials in the field of opto-electronics. Subsequent talks covered topics from fundamental graphene research to biomedical technologies, in addition to an update from the Graphene Flagship COVID-19 Working Group leader, Alberto Bianco.

The second day focused on innovation and the road to commercialisation of graphene and layered materials. It started with a keynote from Nobel Laureate Konstantin Novoselov, who, along with Andre Geim, first isolated graphene in 2004. The sessions then featured success stories from Graphene Flagship Spearhead Projects and put our hard-working Business Developers in the spotlight.

The final day featured a keynote by Valeria Nicolosi, from Graphene Flagship partner Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, who researches the use of novel 2D materials for the development of more efficient energy storage devices. The day focused on collaboration, the most important pillar that drives the engine of the Graphene Flagship, and highlighted the progress made by our many sustainability-focused projects and our new Diversity in Graphene initiative, which introduced the Graphene Flagship Mentoring Programme to the public.

Overall, the event saw 809 attendees, accounting for 74% of the total 1093 registrations – a record number of attendees for a Graphene Flagship virtual event and an excellent turnout overall. In particular, there was superb engagement among the early-career researchers in our consortium, with 53% of our attendees under 35 years old. Overall, the results of our survey showed that 79% of everyone who attended had an excellent or very good experience, 93% loved the programme and 80% had a great experience with our new Graphene Hub portal.

On top of attendance to the lectures, Graphene Hub enables the full networking experience, including one-to-one meetings, business card exchanges and discussion forums. On social media, Graphene for Research, Innovation, Collaboration resulted in over 87,000 views across all of our channels, with 20% more visits to our website and five times more engagement on LinkedIn – confirming that innovators and companies alike were thrilled with our online event.

The Graphene Flagship are delighted to report these excellent figures and look forward to continuing our efforts to bring our accessible, sustainable virtual events to the forefront of science in Europe and beyond. We are cultivating an excellent experience for both delegates and speakers, with many opportunities to network and make new connections. Our next event, Graphene for Healthcare, will take place on 15 October 2020, and it will feature talks from the European Patent Office's Nigel Clarke and INBRAIN's Carolina Aguilar.