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Simeng Wang wins Poster Prize at International Conference on Science and Technology of Synthetic Metals, Guangzhou, China.

I was my great honour to participate the International Conference on Science and Technology of Synthetic Metals in 2016 (ICSM2016), which was held on the 26th of June 2016 in Guangzhou. The conference was one of the biggest event for the field of organic electronic where a vast number of very influential researchers were invited to speak. This includes Professor Alan J. Heeger (represented by Ben B. Y. Hsu) and Professor Ching W. Tang, the pioneers of early stage research of organic electronics. In addition to the very educational talks about the history of the field, the speakers have also presented the latest ground-breaking works. For instance, Henry Yan from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, has presented his new temperature control aggregation technique, which enabled him to achieve an extremely high efficiency up to 11.5%, the record holding value of non-fullerene organic photovoltaic.

I was given the opportunity to present a poster during the conference. The poster discussed a series of novel Naphthalene Diimide (NDI) copolymers containing up to 6 thiophenes, using a highly solubilising side chain synthesised in the Heeney group. NDI copolymers have never been made with such a large number of unsubstituted thiophenes due to the limitation of solubility. The new alkyl chain offered extremely high solubilising power and enabled this type of polymer to be synthesised. This side chain allowed us to investigate the properties of extremely rigid and insoluble structures, hence opened up new opportunity for flexible molecular design of organic semiconducting materials. As this is a fairly new strategy, I felt extremely honoured that the judges appreciated our idea and its potential applications. I was given the top poster prize, which was only awarded to the top 5% of the posters across all sections of the conference.

It was a great opportunity to network with the professionals, learning state-of-the-art techniques and to find inspirations for the projects. It was a fulfilling experience and I have genuinely enjoyed attending the conference.