The symposium "Neuromorphic Materials" is dedicated to the exploration and advancement of materials that emulate neurobiological architecture and functionalities. The focus of the symposium is on the design and synthesis of functional materials whose functional properties and history‑dependent responses emulate synaptic and neuronal behavior. The symposium will cover recent advancements in different classes of inorganic and organic materials such as metals, metal oxides, chalcogenides, conjugated polymers, hydrogels, carbon-based materials, 2D materials. Special emphasis will be placed on how ion‑migration, filamentary switching, nucleation kinetics and domain‑wall motion can be harnessed to achieve analog tuning of a variety of functional properties, such as conductivity, magnetism or optical properties.
Sessions will address how material engineering can translate synaptic and neuronal functionalities into scalable circuit elements. Talks will span crossbar memristive arrays, three‑terminal electrochemical resistive random-access memories (ECRAMs), spintronics devices, phase-change materials, neuromorphic photonics and ferroelectric tunnel junctions, highlighting lithography‑compatible processes, back‑end‐of‐line integration with CMOS, and heterogeneous 3D stacking.
Key topics will also include in-situ and operando characterization techniques, materials processing, interface engineering, and variability control, all of which are critical to ensure scalability, reliability, and low-power operation. The ultimate goal is to accelerate the development of neuromorphic hardware capable of supporting real-world applications in AI, sensory processing, and autonomous systems.
- Memristive materials and devices
- Ionic diffusion and reactions
- Electrochemical resistive random-access memories (ECRAMs)
- Phase change materials
- Magnetoionic
- Artificial synapsis and neurons
- Edge computing
- In-memory in-sense computing
- Spintronics materials
- In-situ and operando characterization of neuromorphic materials
- Materials for neuromorphic computing: Transition metal oxides, perovskites, PCM, Ferroelectric, spintronics, Halide, Organic, 2D materials.
Dr. Mireia Bargalló González is a Científica Titular at the Instituto de Microelectrónica de Barcelona (IMB-CNM, CSIC). Her research focuses on the fabrication, characterization, and reliability of advanced micro- and nanoelectronic devices, with particular emphasis on memristors. She obtained her PhD in Physics from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven/IMEC (Belgium) and has over 19 years of experience in semiconductor device research. She has led several projects on memristive devices, supervised several PhD students, and co-authored over 170 peer-reviewed publications. She has contributed to over 160 conferences and has recently co-organized the Workshop on Memristors 2025.
Francesca Borghi is a tenure track assistant professor at the Physics Department of the University of Milano. She graduated in Physics from the University of Milano in 2011 and she received her PhD in Physics, Astrophysics and Applied Physics in 2015. Her research focuses on structural and functional properties of cluster-assembled nanostructured materials, and the development of neuromorphic computing systems and soft electronic devices. She’s currently coordinating multidisciplinary laboratories for the advanced characterization of neuromorphic systems at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Nanostructured Materials and Interfaces (CIMaINa) at the Physics Department (UniMi). She’s co-founder of GRUCIO, a start-up initiative aiming at the development of unconventional data processing devices.
Cao is an associate professor of Materials Science and Engineering at UIUC. Prior to joining Illinois in 2018, Cao was a research scientist at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. Cao’s interdisciplinary research focuses on developing functional nanomaterials for unconventional electronic systems and biomedical devices. He has published more than 40 research papers on journals including Nature, Science, Nature Electronics, Nature Nanotechnology, and Science Advances, and he is co-inventor on 48 granted U.S. patents and 3 patent applications. Cao’s research has received recognitions including IBM Master Inventor Award (2016), U.S. Frontiers of Engineering by National Academy of Engineering (2016, 2019, 2025), and IBM Invention Achievement Awards (2011-2018, 17 times). He made Forbes’s list of “30 Under 30” for 2012 in the Science category, as “the field’s brightest stars under the age of 30 representing the entrepreneurial, creative and intellectual best of their generation”. MIT Technology Review listed him in 2016 as one of the top thirty-five global innovators under the age of thirty-five (TR35).
Prof. Dr. Regina Dittmann received a degree in Physics from the University of Cologne, Germany in 1990 and the PhD in Physics from University of Gießen, Germany in 1994. Since November 2012, she is a professor at RWTH Aachen University, Germany and since 2022 a guest professor at the department of engineering at Lund University, Sweden. Regina Dittmann is currently leading a group at Peter Grünberg Institute (PGI-7) in Forschungszentrum Jülich, working on atomically controlled growth of oxides, memristive devices, and neuromorphic circuits. She is an internationally recognized expert on memristive devices and the elucidation of their working and failure mechanisms.
Ignasi FinaSami Oukassi received his engineering degree in materials science from Institut National Polytechnique Grenoble INPG in 2004 and Ph.D. in Electrochemistry from Université Paris XII in 2008. He joined CEA-LETI in 2014, where he is currently Senior Scientist and Head of the RF & Energy Devices Laboratory. His research focuses on solid-state ionic microscale devices, including microbatteries, microsupercapacitors, and neuromorphic components. Dr Oukassi is the author of over 50 peer-reviewed publications and holds 55 patents in the fields of energy storage, conversion, and integration for IoT and embedded systems.
Prof. Jordi Sort received his PhD Degree in Materials Science from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) in 2002 (Extraordinary Award). The topic of his PhD dissertation was the study of magnetic exchange interactions in ferromagnetic-antiferromagnetic systems. He worked for two years as Postdoctoral Researcher at the SPINTEC Laboratory (Grenoble) and subsequently stayed six months at Argonne National Laboratory (USA). He also performed long-term secondments at the Grenoble High Magnetic Fields Laboratory (five months) and at Los Alamos National Laboratory (four months). At present, Prof. Sort leads the “Group of Smart Nanoengineered Materials, Nanomechanics and Nanomagnetism (Gnm3)” at UAB, which focuses its research activities on the synthesis of a wide variety of functional materials (electrodeposited films, lithographed structures, porous materials, bulk metallic glasses, nanocomposites) and the study of their structural, magnetic, magnetoelectric, mechanical and thermal properties. This research aims at enhancing the performance of these materials in new technological applications that go beyond the state-of-the-art. Prof. Sort’s research activity was awarded by the Catalan Physical Society (Jordi Porta i Jué’s Prize, 2000), as well as by the Spanish Royal Physical Society (Young Researcher Award in Experimental Physics, 2003), the Federation of Materials Societies (FEMS Prize in Materials Science & Technology, 2015) and UPC/Naturgy (Duran Farell Award for Technological Research, 2020). Prof. Sort has supervised 20 PhD Theses and is currently co-supervising the work of 6 more PhD students. So far, Prof. Sort has published around 375 articles that have received approximately 12400 citations (h=57) in ISI Web of Science. Many of these articles have been published in top-ranked journals like Nature Communications, ACS Nano, Advanced Materials, Advanced Science, Materials Horizons, ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, Nanoscale, etc. He has issued 7 patents and has managed 38 national/international research projects. Prof. Sort has been personally appointed as Invited/Plenary Speaker in more than 100 conferences. In 2014 Prof. Jordi Sort was awarded a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council (ERC). His project, entitled "Merging Nanoporous Materials with Energy-Efficient Spintronics (SPIN-PORICS)", aimed to integrate engineered nanoporous materials into novel spintronic applications. He was also the Coordinator of the “BeMAGIC” Marie Sklodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network (ITN-ETN), whose aim was to use magnetoelectric effects for memory and biomedical applications. The Network gathered a total of 24 Partners, from throughout Europe, including 7 companies. In 2022 he has been awarded an Advanced Grant from the ERC with title “Voltage-Reconfigurable Magnetic Invisibility: A New Concept for Data Security Based on Engineered Magnetoelectric Materials (REMINDS)”, which focuses on the use of magnetoelectric materials for data security applications.