Speakers – Carbon Conference 2026

Take the Stage at Carbon 2026

Abstracts Due February 23rd, 2026

Being selected to present at Carbon 2026 offers a unique platform to share your research and insights with leading scientists, engineers, and industry innovators from around the world. As a speaker or poster, you’ll showcase your work to a global audience, spark collaborations across disciplines, and contribute to shaping the future of carbon science. It’s an opportunity to gain recognition, expand your professional network, and inspire the next wave of discovery.

Presenting Our Carbon 2026 Plenary Speakers

Mark Hersam

Walter P. Murphy Professor of Materials Science and Engineering

Dr. Mark Hersam is the Walter P. Murphy Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern University, where he also serves as Director of the Materials Research Center and Department Chair. His academic appointments span Chemistry, Applied Physics, Medicine, and Electrical Engineering, reflecting a career defined by interdisciplinary leadership and broad scientific impact.

Dr. Hersam’s research addresses some of today’s most consequential technological challenges, including nanoelectronic materials, renewable energy, neuromorphic computing, quantum information science, additive manufacturing, and advanced sensing technologies. His work consistently sits at the intersection of fundamental discovery and real-world application.

A MacArthur Fellow and recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award, Dr. Hersam has earned numerous honors from leading scientific societies. He is an Executive Editor of ACS Nano, a Highly Cited Researcher, and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the National Academy of Inventors. Beyond academia, Dr. Hersam is a successful entrepreneur, having founded NanoIntegris and Volexion to commercialize advanced materials for the nanoelectronics and battery industries. He holds more than 170 patents and has authored over 750 peer-reviewed publications cited more than 84,000 times.

Xiaolin Li

Chief Scientist | Director of Sodium-ion Alliance for Grid Energy Storage, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Dr. Xiaolin Li currently is a chief scientist and Director of Sodium-ion Alliance for Grid Energy Storage at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). Since 2010, Li has been working on understanding the mechanisms of battery fading in bulk structures and at interphases across time scales and leveraging the findings obtained from model material systems to develop high-performance, low-cost battery materials/chemistries for scale-up production, large cell fabrication and reliability evaluation. He is known in the battery field for his work on the development of Si anodes for next generation Li-ion batteries and sodium-ion and aqueous zinc batteries for grid energy storage applications.

Li holds B.S. and Ph.D. degree in Chemistry from Tsinghua University. Before joining PNNL, Li did his postdoctoral research at Stanford University working on graphene and carbon nanotubes for nanoelectronics and bio-applications. Li is an associated editor of npj Energy Materials and serves on the Battery Division Executive Committee for The Electrochemical Society.

Stephanie Reich

Professor of Physics

Dr. Stephanie Reich is Chair for Experimental Solid State Physics at Freie Universität Berlin and an internationally recognized leader in the physics and chemistry of carbon-based and two-dimensional nanomaterials. Her work has played a central role in advancing the understanding and engineering of nanoscale carbon systems.

Dr. Reich’s research focuses on the fundamental properties of carbon and 2D nanomaterials, with particular emphasis on nanoscale engineering and light–matter interactions. Her career began with foundational studies on the vibrational, electronic, and optical properties of carbon nanotubes—work that helped establish key principles underlying the field.

She is the author of a widely used textbook on carbon nanotubes and has published more than 250 research papers cited over 28,000 times (h-index 64). Dr. Reich leads the Research Center on Molecules and 2D Materials in Berlin and serves as the long-term organizer of the IWEPNM Kirchberg Winterschool, a premier Gordon-style conference for carbon-based and 2D materials research.

Vanessa Fierro

CNRS Research Professor

Dr. Vanessa Fierro is a CNRS Research Professor and leader of the Biosourced Materials research team at Institut Jean Lamour (IJL) in France. With a distinguished international career and more than 400 publications, she is recognized as one of the world’s most influential researchers in sustainable carbon materials.

Dr. Fierro’s work centers on the development of biosourced (“green”) carbons with high-performance properties, demonstrating that renewable carbon materials can compete with—and in some cases outperform—conventional carbons. Her research spans a wide range of applications, including environmental remediation, gas separation, energy storage, supercapacitors, and hydrogen storage and compression.

Her achievements have been recognized with numerous honors, including the Charles E. Pettinos Award from the American Carbon Society and the CNRS Silver Medal. She has supervised more than 20 PhD students and 30 postdoctoral researchers, and her work consistently ranks within the top 2% of most cited researchers worldwide.

Pulickel Ajayan

Benjamin M. and Mary Greenwood Anderson Professor in Engineering, Rice University

Dr. Pulickel Ajayan is a pioneer in the area of nanotechnology. He has published more than 1,300 journal papers, earning more than 240,000 citations and h-index of 240 (by Google Scholar). His work covers diverse areas of nanomaterials, including nanoparticles, nanotubes, diamond, 2D materials, nanocomposites, energy storage materials and 3D printing.

He is the Benjamin M. and Mary Greenwood Anderson Professor of Engineering at Rice University and the founding chair of the Department of Materials Science and NanoEngineering. He is the recipient of several awards, such as the Spiers Memorial Award, MRS medal, Alexander von Helmholtz-Humboldt senior award, and lifetime nanotechnology award from the Houston Technology Center. He received Docteur Honoris Causa from the Universite Catholique de of Louvain and distinguished alumni recognition from his Alma Mater Banaras Hindu University, and the Materials Science department at Northwestern University. He maintains a research group of around 30-40 members and has many collaborations around the world.

Submit Abstracts Here

Submissions will be reviewed for acceptance by the Carbon 2026 Technical Program Committee.

Guidelines

Abstracts are limited to 400 words and 1 figure embedding any element that cannot be typed directly in the text using the text edition toolbox.
The figure can include graphs, schemes tables, equations, etc. All elements must be grouped in one single figure (max ½ page).
For the figure, you must use the attachment tool available on our submission platform. Captions and table titles must be included directly in the image (accepted formats for the figures are ‘jpg’, ‘png’, and ‘jpeg’).
Simple equations can be typed directly in the text using the edition toolbox. However, complex equations that cannot be typed using the toolbox must be embedded in the abstract as a figure. Please do not copy-paste equations from external equation editors in the text.

Please make sure that:

There are no spelling mistakes (authors, affiliation, abstract title, and content);
The uploaded image names are relevant (file names will be displayed in the book of abstracts, avoid image.png for example);
The title is NOT fully written in capital letters, please keep them for the first letter of your title, proper nouns, acronyms, etc.;
Only the first letter of authors’ first name and last name are in capital letter.

IMPORTANT: during the submission process you will have to choose from 2 to 3 topics related to your abstract. This step is very important because the abstract allocation to Reviewers is based on the related topics. In order to avoid any delay and misallocation, please select the most relevant topic(s) for your abstract.

Note that each participant is allowed to submit two abstracts, with a maximum of one oral presentation, due to limited slots. In the event that the lead author of a paper selected for an oral presentation finally decides not to participate in the conference, the paper may only be presented by a co-author if the co-author does not already have an oral presentation allocated.

Presenting authors are responsible for their own registration fees, travel, and hotel costs to the conference.

If you have any questions, please contact the organizing committee at cameron.thomson@ingevity.com.

1	Clean Energy and Clean Water	Utilizing carbon-based systems for advanced gas capture, hydrogen storage, and purification technologies.
2	Carbon materials for electrochemical energy storage	Development, application, and characterization of carbon materials for batteries and supercapacitors.
3	Carbon materials for electrochemical conversion processes	Development, application, and characterization of carbon materials for electrochemical conversion processes: fuel cells, electrolyzers, electrocatalysts, sensors, etc.
4	Carbon and catalysis	Photocatalysis, CO₂ conversion, electrocatalysis, etc.
5	Innovations in synthesis, processing, and characterization	Advanced methods to create, manipulate, and analyze carbon-based materials with tailored structures and properties for cutting-edge applications.
6	New carbon-based materials and engineered carbons	Advanced carbon materials—from graphene and carbon nanotubes to fullerenes, nanodiamonds, porous carbons, and MXenes—along with innovative approaches to modeling, synthesis, and combining carbon with other elements or materials.
7	Carbon for structural, nuclear and thermal management applications	Fibers, composites, manufactured graphite and other carbon materials for extreme environments, structural and nuclear applications.
8	Kerogens, coals, cokes, graphite, soot, carbonization/graphitization processes	Forms of carbon-rich materials formed through varying degrees of thermal maturation and structural ordering during carbonization and graphitization processes.
9	Adsorption and diffusion in porous carbons	Characterization, diffusion, transport, and dynamics in adsorption systems: advances in adsorption processes and modeling approaches.
10	Theory and simulation of carbon materials and their applications, including machine learning	Molecular dynamics, ab initio methods, materials discovery, machine learning, multiscale modelling, data-driven materials discovery, digital twins, and integration with experimental workflows.
11	Next-gen carbons for health	Innovations in drug delivery, biosensing, tissue regeneration, wearables and antimicrobial technologies.
	Special session: in memory of Wes Hoffman	This special session honors the legacy of Dr. Wes Hoffman, a respected leader and long-time contributor to the carbon science community. Through a series of invited talks and personal reflections, we will celebrate his impactful research, mentorship, and service to the field. The session will highlight Wes’s contributions to carbon materials science, his dedication to collaboration and innovation, and the profound influence he had on colleagues and students alike. Attendees are invited to join in commemorating his life and work, and to share memories that reflect his enduring impact on the community.