When the inevitable decision was reached on April 21^st to make NANO 2020 100% virtual, there was just 14 weeks for the totally new committee to plan and implement the conference from scratch. Essentially the whole NTC ExCom stepped up, and with the help of a mixture of experienced conference organizers and new recruits the result was a highly successful event, although considerably smaller than usual (and not without its anxious moments.) While most of the authors intending to present papers at the Montreal conference switched to the postponed physical event in 2021, a satisfactory number decided to present virtually in 2020. A new website was developed with a new Call for Papers and a new reviewing team. Although the presentations were all pre-recorded (as “glitch insurance,” the team was committed to live sessions with live Q&A to retain as much as possible of a more traditional conference atmosphere. Of course, live Q&A introduces the time-zone problem which is insoluble but mitigated by having all the recorded presentations available for two days preceding the actual conference dates.

The technical program was comprised of 152 presentations drawn from more than 200 submissions from 34 countries or regions, including 6 plenary talks, with 9 keynote, 25 invited and 84 contributed presentations in three parallel tracks, and 29 posters. The proceedings will be available shortly in IEEE Xplore, but can still be accessed online, with all the recorded presentations, until the end of August by registering at 2020.ieenano.org.

The Best Paper awards are as follows:

Best Conference Paper Award:

“A 3D UV Photodetector Based on TiO2 Nanoparticles Decorated Microtubular Graphene FET” by Yuning Li, Shasha Li, Yang Zhang, Weijie Yin, Ke Li, Qing You, Tao Deng, Beijing Jiaotong University

Best Student Paper Award:

“First Principle Analysis of Os-Passivated Armchair Graphene” by Vipul Kumar Nishad(1), Atul Kumar Nishad(2), Sourajeet Roy(3), Brajesh Kumar Kaushik(3), and Rohit Sharma(1)
(1) Indian Institute of Technology Ropar,  (2) National Institute of Technology Warangal, (3) Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee

Best Poster Award:

“Optoelectronic Thinning of Transition Metal Dichalcogenides for Device Fabrication” by Suichu Huang(1), Xuezeng Zhao(1), Yuebing Zheng(2)
(1) Harbin Institute of Technology, (2) The Univerisity of Texas at Austin

The 20^th Anniversaries of both the NANO conference series and of the NTC were celebrated at NANO 2020. Some short video messages by Past-Presidents and Past NANO Chairs, can be found at https://2020.ieeenano.org/special-events and the Young Professionals event was based on a panel Q&A discussion by some of these contributors. Other special events included a WIE panel discussion and the awards ceremony.

The distribution of registered attendees (total 137) is shown below. By the end of the conference, there had been 106 downloads of the entire Proceedings (including videos) and 36,594 total “hits” on papers, abstracts, program schedule, proceedings fore-matter, videos, etc.

Jim Morris and Guangyong Li
NANO 2020 General Co-Chairs

NANO 2020 attendees by country