After kick-off in Nantes, 9-11th June 2015, 9 of the 13 ESRs started their PhDs as anticipated, six months into the project at the start of October, with the rest shortly afterwards. At project end most have now completed their PhDs, several are in final stage of preparation. We held training workshops every six months, covering communication skills and activities, graphene “nanobuilding blocks”, commerce training, and nanocharacterisation skills and training, finishing with a ten-day tour of Japan giving workshops and seminars at academic, industry and government sites. Details of all workshops are on the project website eetraining.wordpress.com. We performed over twice the number of initially proposed scientific exchanges, albeit of more focused and shorter duration, with all students participating in at least one intersectorial exchange. All the ESRs have multiple publications. All deliverables and milestones have been met, communication and dissemination activities are ahead of those initially proposed.
The action scientific content has been highly successful. A range of individual nanoobjects have been synthesized, isolated or exfoliated from host material, fully characterized, and in many cases subject to post-treatment chemical functionalisation (both covalent and non-covalent). Collaborative studies of treatment processes, templating, solvent effects and sample hydration all resulted in joint high-impact publications (ACIE, JACS, AdvMat, etc) and ESR oral presentations at international conferences. Developments in super-resolution (sub-wavelength) Raman imaging is producing deconvoluted Raman spectroscopy maps at unprecedented sub-50nm spatial resolution, and is exploited for characterising samples produced by other ESRs (associated technology taken to market). An example collaboration between three ESRs in NHRF, Unizar and CNRS-IMN have successfully functionalised, characterized and simulated MoS2 monolayers with light activated pyrene “molecular switches” (published in Nature 2D). New graphene-based composites resulted in several “world firsts”, including the most sensitive liquid-based strain sensor, ultra-high conductivity low-loading composites (IP protected) and unprecedented sensitivity/selectivity gas sensors. The launch of a new company AMD is allowing the exploitation of technology and materials developed in the ITN.
As part of the business and communication training the ESRs developed their own “Grand Challenge” projects, including innovative ideas such as a chemistry card game (on sale on Amazon), a LGBT-targeted YouTube channel, trade stands and school outreach projects. We have produced a suggestions guide on ITN communication.
