PhD students, Siva & SungJin receive Research Awards

At the annual Graduate and Industry Networking (GAIN) event, PhD students Siva Mohan and SungJin Yang have won the GAIN Research Award for “Excellence in Research.

Siva Mohan won it for 2024 GAIN. Research on graphene transfer and integration.

SungJin Yang won it for 2023 GAIN. Research on resistive switching devices for 5G/6G systems.

Back to back awards for the group research. Congrats to Siva and SungJin.

 

 

Dr. Kireev won UT-Austin Best Research Paper Award.

Recent former postdoc scholar, Dr. Dmitry Kireev won the UT Austin’s Best Research Paper Hamilton Award from the University Co-op for our blood pressure wearable published in nature nanotechnology in 2022. This was a pioneering work for personalized health and prevention of hypertension. The joint collaboration was with Dr. Roozbeh Jafari lab at TAMU. UT-Austin student co-authors include Neelotpala Kumar.

Dr. Kireev is now an assistant professor at UMass.

Grad Student receives DoE Graduate Research Award

Nick Ignacio is a third-year MS&E Ph.D. candidate working on atomistic studies of 2D materials using STM and TEM. He currently holds the position of the MS&E Graduate Student Assembly (GSA) Representative and is spearheading the revival of the Materials Research Society Student Chapter at the University of Texas at Austin. Recently, he has been honored with the prestigious Office of Science Graduate Research (SCGSR) Award from the U.S. Department of Energy.
The SCGSR program is designed to recognize and support exceptional U.S. graduate students by offering supplementary funding for a portion of their graduate thesis research. This research takes place at a Department of Energy (DOE) laboratory, focusing on areas of significance to the DOE Office of Science. Nick is among the elite group of 60 students selected for this program and will be conducting his research at the Center of Nanophase Materials located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Nick’s academic journey began with the completion of his Bachelor of Science in Materials Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) in 2021. His current research interests center on the investigation and control of phase changes and atomic-level defects in layered materials, particularly within the context of their applications in neuromorphic systems.
When asked about his motivation for delving into the field of Materials Science and Engineering, Nick shared, “the field really appealed to me as I wasn’t sure what I wanted to study, and the multidisciplinary aspect of materials science made a lot of sense for me to study since engineering problems in all fields face some sort of materials limitation.” In his leisure time, Nick enjoys staying active and embracing the outdoors, whether it’s through long runs, bike rides, or simply spending quality time with his dogs.

Wearable Blood Pressure Monitoring in Nature Nano. Global media interest.

We report the development of graphene electronic tattoos for continuous blood pressure monitoring using bio-impedance modality. Machine learning techniques were implemented to get Grade A accuracy results, which is the highest grade of the IEEE standard.

Work is now published in Nature Nanotechnology, and is a collaboration with Roozbeh Jafari’s group at Texas A&M. Postdoc Scholar Dr. Dmitry Kireev is the first author.

Several media outlets have reported on this significant achievement.

UTexas News Release

WebMD

KXAN News Station Live Coverage

IEEE Spectrum

Spectrum TV Coverage all over Texas

New Scientist Coverage

ACS C&EN

Daily Beast

Physics Today

Physics World

Physics Org

Austin American-Statesman

CNN

Univision

Business Insider Mexico

-Metro, the largest print newspaper in the World

Grad Student Siva Receives Student Leader Award

Sivasakthya (Siva) Mohan has received the Student Leader Award from the Cockrell School of Engineering. A major honor. Congrats Siva!! The official citation is

“Every year, Engineering Student Life presents student leader awards to undergraduate and graduate students to recognize students who have motivated, guided, mentored and supported Cockrell School student organizations by working effectively with colleagues, honoring contributions and pushing others to excel”

Review of memristors and applications in Science.

A thorough review of resistance switching devices, aka, memristors is now in Science.

This work was led by Mario Lanza at KAUST with many other leading scholars contributing to the review article.

We describe memristors made from 2D materials, a phenomenon we discovered and can be utilized for various applications including 5G/6G/THz ‘zero-power’ switches.

The link to the Science review is here.

MoS2 6G Switches (500GHz, 100Gb/s) in nature electronics

Our latest work on non-volatile ‘zero-power’ switches has been published in nature electronics.

This switches feature DC-500GHz bandwidth and can transmit data at 100Gb/s at ~300GHz. They can also be switched in less than a nanosecond. This performance meets/exceeds the IEEE 6G standardization target.

The collaborative work was the focus of the dissertation of former PhD student Myungsoo Kim, who is now a professor at UNIST.

The link to the paper is here.

A nature research briefing accessible to all is here

UT Press release is here.

IEEE Media Coverage is here.

Daily Texan

R&S and FormFactor Support UT Research for 5G Switches

Rohde & Schwarz and FormFactor Support UT Austin in Research on Improved RF Switches

https://www.rohde-schwarz.com/us/about/news-press/all-news/rohde-schwarz-and-formfactor-support-the-university-of-texas-at-austin-in-research-on-improved-rf-switches-for-5g-and-6g-press-release-detailpage_229356-1165006.html

https://www.microwavejournal.com/articles/37443-rohde-and-schwarz-and-formfactor-support-ut-austin-in-research-on-improved-rf-switches 

The RF Switches were pioneered by Akinwande laboratory based on atomically 2D materials such as h-BN and MoS2. This research has resulted in many publications at Nature electronics, Nature communications, Advanced materials, and Nanoletters.

Congrats Myungsoo Kim, Best PhD Thesis Award. Now Asst. Professor at UNIST.

2020 PhD graduate, Dr. Myungsoo Kim has won the UT-Austin Ben Streetman PhD Prize “For Outstanding Research by a Graduate Student in Electronic and Photonic Materials and Devices.” CONGRATS!

Myungsoo began his faculty career in 2021/2022 as an Assistant Professor at UNIST in South Korea.
Dr. Kim authored several high-profile papers including 5G switches in Nature Electronics, and high-frequency applications of 2D memristors at the IEDM.

Nature Nano: Single atom (smallest) memristor

In original discovery research reported in nature nanotechnology, we discover the underlying physics (metal bonding to atomic vacancy) behind atomristor or memristor effect in atomic sheets using MoS2 as a model. This is arguably the smallest atomic memory unit (1nm feature size).

Work led by Dr. Saban Hus and with several distinguished collaborators.

Article Main page https://www.nature.com/articles/s41565-020-00789-w 

Direct pdf file https://rdcu.be/b997C

Press Release 

Nature Blog Post 

Nature Electronics: hBN switches for 5G & THz. On TV

A single atomically-thin layer of hexagonal boron nitride shows that thinner is better with regards to radio-frequency switching applications. This work is now published and is based on our earlier discovery of atomristors.

Fruitful collaboration between UT-Austin (lead grad student, Myungsoo Kim) and CNRS in Lille led by Emiliano Pallecchi and Henri Happy.

Title: Analog switches made from boron nitride monolayers for application in 5G and terahertz communication systems. Nature Electronics May 2018. ->PDF.

A blog post in Nature can be read here.

News Media coverage:

Live TV interview on the public importance

Public Radio interview and Texas Standard transcript

NPR on KUT 

IEEE Spectrum News

UT-Austin Press Release

UK Daily Mail

PhysicsWorld

Army Press Release

Federal News Network

Nature News

Yahoo 

Redditt Commentary