Oksana Yurkevich, best oral presentation award at NANO2022

19/09/2022

Oksana Yurkevich got the best oral presentation award on the Nano2022 - Functional Materials by Thin Film Coatings symposium for her talk on "Polymer-organic hybrids for inducing self-healing functionality in metal oxides".

FIB cut on the PVC/ZnO hybrid surface with the shape of the "Wind Comb" sculpture by Eduardo Chillida.

Oksana Yurkevich is a predoctoral researcher at the Nanomaterials Group of CIC nanoGUNE, were she has developed her research within the framework of the European ITN project HYCOAT.

Yurkevich's work is related to the development of self-healing materials, which are considered a crucial step for mankind on the path to a sustainable future. Materials that can restore their defects without losing their functionality will serve longer and require less human-involved technical inspection and maintenance.

Despite the significant efforts of researchers, n-type semiconducting materials with the possibility to heal were not known. In their work, Yurkevich and the team developed self-healing semiconducting metal oxides by the use of gas phase chemistry to modify polymeric substrates. They demonstrated the applicability of their approach for indium, zinc, and tin oxides, materials that are of great importance to the electronics industry. The results were presented in the Nano2022 Conference - Functional Materials by Thin Film Coatings symposium, were Yurkevich's talk "Polymer-organic hybrids for inducing self-healing functionality in metal oxides" got the best presentation award.

The left image is a photo of the sculpture “Wind comb”. The other two images illustrate the healing of a selectively FIB-etched pattern on the PVC/ZnO surface over time.
Source: Supplementary file of the paper "Entropy-Driven Self-Healing of Metal Oxides Assisted by Polymer–Inorganic Hybrid Materials", published by Yurkevich et al. in *Advanced Materials* in May 2022.

NANO 2022 is the 16th conference in the series organised under the auspices of the International Committee on Nanostructured Materials (ICNM) every two years, and took place in Sevilla from 6 to 10 June 2022. The Functional Materials by Thin Film Coatings symposium covered various aspects of functionalization of material my means of thin film coatings. Those include developments and optimizations of coating processes, thin film assisted or enabled nanomaterial fabrications and applications that are enabled by thin films. Thin film coatings became an essential means for the development of functional materials and are meanwhile an integral part of many industries, including optical, electronic, packaging, energy, medical, etc. industries.