Frontier Center Scholar Spotlight: IIT Bombay’s Bhupesh Bhardwaj at MMC ’23

I had previously attended the Materials Research Society (MRS) conference in San Francisco. The MRS was a huge, huge, huge crowd of people, and that meant there was not much chance to interact. At my MMC poster presentation, there was a nice layout of presenters, and I had time with judges to explain my posters. I got nice questions, and we had a chance for a nice discussion about the work and its future implications. Other people also stopped at my posters, and we had a chance to talk for 15 or 20 minutes, and that was a very nice part of the MMC.

I attended presentations on the first day. These were talks on the applications of solar cells. It was nice that the researchers’ talks were industry oriented and not just limited to the academic level. The presenters and the audience stayed engaged, stuck around, and talked.

The MMC conference had a big cluster of different specialties. Other conferences attract narrow groups, so the posters and talks are all on a few topics only. At the MMC, I saw a huge variety of topics presented. It gave me an opportunity to talk and think outside of my research box.

My overall journey was fantastic. From a personal perspective, the best part was getting to interact with people from outside my country and culture. I worked with people from the US and (South) Korea and Europe. We did cuisine exchanges! We had a chance to talk about differences in culture and experiences. I got to know how to work with people from different backgrounds. I believe that strong professional relationships depend on this personal bonding too.

In my work with the Krishna group, two things stood out. First, they held a “retreat” meeting just a few days after I arrived. This retreat gave me an opportunity to interact with the research group and people outside of it. It was a chance to show the work I was doing to interested people.

Second, the Krishna group holds a weekly “technical interchange meeting” (TIM) that is very helpful. Lots of groups just hold group meetings with quick updates. Most of my previous technical discussions only had feedback from the professor. At these TIMs, we had the perspective of each student with their speciality and experience. Some people approach problems from the pure science, some from the instrumentation, and some from the characterization. These perspectives helped me and motivated me to have more discussions like this and get insight from the perspective of my peer researchers.