Happy New Year

2020 will forever be the year of viruses for me and a lot of us. At Maastricht University, the year started with a university wide cyber-attack with ransomware. After the computer-viruses came the human viruses, with COVID-19 shutting down one country after the other, and shutting down education systems as well.

Hopefully 2021 will be better behaved, though we know already some of the hurdles which will make life interesting the coming year. COVID-19 is far from over, and it will take at least a year to vaccinate everyone. Furthermore, as of the first of today, the United Kingdom is no longer a part of the EU, making travel inside Europe a little harder again.

But before we launch into these new and interesting times, lets look back at 2020 one last time, keeping up with  tradition. What have I done during the last year of academic merit.

1. Publications: +6 (and currently a handful in progress)

• Impact of methane concentration on surface morphology and boron incorporation of heavily boron-doped single crystal diamond layers

  Rozita Rouzbahani, Shannon S. Nicley, Danny E. P. Vanpoucke, Fernando Lloret, Paulius Pobendinskas, Daniel Araujo, and Ken Haenen,

  Carbon 172, 463-473 (2021),
  doi: 10.1016/j.carbon.2020.10.061 {IF(2019)=8.821}
• Small Data Materials Design with Machine Learning: When the Average Model Knows Best

  Danny E. P. Vanpoucke, Onno S. J. van Knippenberg, Ko Hermans, Katrien V. Bernaerts, and Siamak Mehrkanoon

  J. Appl. Phys. 128 (5), 054901 (2020), [Featured Article][Scilight]
  doi: 10.1063/5.0012285 {IF(2019)=2.286}
• Partitioning the vibrational spectrum: Fingerprinting defects in solids

  Danny E. P. Vanpoucke,

  Comput. Mater. Sci. 181, 109736 (2020),
  doi: 10.1016/j.commatsci.2020.109736 {IF(2019)=2.863}
• Influence of diamond crystal orientation on the interaction with biological matter

  Viraj Damle, Kaiqi Wu, Oreste De Luca, Natalia Ortí-Casañ, Neda Norouzi, Aryan Morita, Joop de Vries, Hans Kaper, Inge Zuhorn, Ulrich Eisel, Danny E.P. Vanpoucke, Petra Rudolf, and Romana Schirhagl,

  Carbon 162, 1-12 (2020),
  doi: 10.1016/j.carbon.2020.01.115 {IF(2019)=8.821}
• UV-Curable Biobased Polyacrylates Based on a Multifunctional 2 Monomer Derived from Furfural

  Jules Stouten, Danny E. P. Vanpoucke, Guy Van Assche, and Katrien V. Bernaerts,

  Macromolecules 53(4), 1388-1404 (2020),
  doi: 10.1021/acs.macromol.9b02659 {IF(2019)=5.918}
• Investigation of structural, electronic and magnetic properties of breathing metal–organic framework MIL-47(Mn): a first principles approach

  Mohammadreza Hosseini, Danny E.P. Vanpoucke, Paolo Giannozzi, Masoud Berahman, Nasser Hadipour,

  RSC Adv. 10, 4786-4794 (2020),
  doi: 10.1039/C9RA09196C {IF(2019)=3.119}

2. Completed refereeing tasks: +17

• Applied Physics Letters
• Journal of Physical Chemistry (2x)
• Computational Materials Science (2x)
• Materials Chemistry and Physics
• Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter (5x)
• Diamond and Related Materials (6x)

3. Conferences & workshops in times of Corona: +3/+1 (Attended & Organised), >+4 internal 

ACOS poster prize 2020

With regard to conferences, 2020 was the year everyone came into contact with the concept of the online conference. Many conferences and events got canceled: such as TEDx@UHasselt (which will return in 2021)

• ACOS 2020, Online, Oktober 28^th, 2020 [poster presentation and video-pitch, 2^nd poster prize]
• RSC Chemical Science Symposium 2020, Online, September 29^th-30^th, 2020 [iposter presentation]
• D-NL-HIT project meetings [oral presentations]
  • Virtual Partner Meeting, April 8^th, 2020
  • Adhesives Pilot Branch meeting, October 7th, 2020
  • Virtual Partner Meeting, October 15^th, 2020
  • UV-Curing Branch meeting, October 22^nd, 2020
• SBDD XXV, Hasselt University, Belgium, March 11^th-13^th, 2020 [(invited) oral presentation, poster presentation] …On Friday13^th Belgium went into it’s first lock-down.
• Pilot Branch meeting adhesives D-NL-HIT project, Maastricht University, Brighlands campus, February 26th, 2020 [Organised]

4. Science Communication & Social media:   

• In February 2020, I finally caved and joined Twitter as @DelocalizedD .
• Added several new repositories to my github account, with the most important ones being:
  • AMADEUS framework for ML of small datasets
  • LS-SVM library
• Started a YouTube channel (for the ACOS video pitch)

5. Current size of HIVE:

• Continued work on a public version of HIVE at github: HIVE 4.x   (26K lines, 9 commands available)
• 61K lines of program (code: 69 %)
• ~100 files
• 49 (command line) options

6. Hive-STM program:

• 32 new users in  2020 (making for a total of 407 users)

And now, upward and onward, a new year, a fresh start.