Good News!
Ronggui Yang Receives NSF CAREER Award Assistant Professor Ronggui Yang has been awarded an NSF CAREER award. His 5-year $400K CAREER project seeks to advance research and education programs in nanoscale thermal transport: to develop an integrative experimental and simulation program including a novel high throughput, high spatiotemporal resolution photo-thermal microscope to study thermal transport processes in innovative materials and devices that are critical to microelectronics and energy technologies and to educate the public about what nanotechnology can do and cannot do in various thermal and energy applications. CAREER is NSF's most prestigious award in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research.
- Over 100 MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) transducers will be used in each future automobile.
- Over 10 MEMS sensors and actuators will be used in each cell phone.
- Military and commercial applications will increasingly benefit from the use of MEMS, especially when anticipated significant improvements in performance are realized via the integration of MEMS with novel nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS).
- Impact on electronic products, e.g. cell phone and computer, through a piece of 1-mm thick polymer film with effective thermal conductivity 100X better than copper.
- Impact on organic displays or sensor packages through a nano-scaled barrier coating with 10,000X enhanced hermeticity.
- Impact on wireless communication and sensing through a patch antenna that is 5-10X smaller than current antennas.
- Impact on biomedical and environmental detection through a biosensor with a single molecule sensitivity while reducing false alarm rate by 100X.
- Impact on energy applications through a light emitting diode with 3X improvement in efficiency and 100X improvement in device-level thermal resistance.
- Impact on electronic and energy storage products through a solid state supercapacitor with the capacitor density increased by 25-100X.
