The newly established UCSD Student Chapter is proudly presenting its first report. Similar to many other student chapters, our mission is to promote the interest and advancement of electrochemical science and technology among students here at UCSD. Our supportive faculty advisor, Shirley Meng, is head of the UCSD Laboratory for Energy Conversion and Storage. With everyone’s enthusiastic efforts, our ECS chapter will undoubtedly succeed in achieving the great yet attainable visions we have for the organization. We look forward to finally building a coherent community of electrochemists at UCSD, new relationships with other fellow student chapters, and partners outside of the UCSD community. The upcoming 2014-2015 school year looks fruitful for electrochemical science!

With the excitement of a new ECS student chapter, the founding members wanted to demonstrate their enthusiasm by hosting their first seminar on June 25, 2014. Although this chapter had been only active for a month, it was a great pleasure to host our first speaker. With the help of Professor Meng, Olaf Magnussen from the Institute of Experimental and Applied Physics of the Christian-Albrechts- Universität (CAU) in Kiel, Germany presented his work on “Surface dynamics at electrochemical interfaces.” During his talk, he introduced his work on fast in situ scanning tunneling microscopy (Video- STM), which allows direct observation of the atomic motion at the interface. With the help of statistical analysis, quantitative data on the diffusion barriers and interaction energies can be deduced from the STM videos.

This seminar brought students from various departments such as of Physics, Chemistry, Materials Science, and Nanoengineering. The students at UCSD show great interest in electrochemistry and the ECS organization. With this seminar the organization has gained 25 new members. This summer, we hope to plan the events for the upcoming academic school year (2014–2015) and host more seminars.

More about UCSD can be found on their web page at www.ucsdecs.org .