Assistant Professor Arend van der Zande was named to the 2018 list of Highly Cited Researchers by Clarivate Analytics.

Highly Cited Researchers is an annual list recognizing influential researchers in the sciences and social sciences from around the world. The 2018 list contains 6,078 researchers, with about 43 percent of them from the U.S. The list is based on exceptional contemporary achievement: only highly cited papers in science and social sciences journals indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection during the 11-year period 2006-2016 were surveyed.

Highly cited papers are defined as those that rank in the top 1 percent by citations for field and publication year. This percentile-based selection method removes the citation advantage of older papers relative to recently published ones, since papers are weighed against others in the same annual cohort. Of the world population of scientists and social scientists, the Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researchers are one in 1,000.

van der Zande earned a BS in physics and mathematics in 2003 from the University of California at Santa Cruz, and an MS and PhD (in 2008 and 2011) in physics from Cornell University. In his lab at Illinois, he engineers new electronic, photonic, and mechanical devices using 2D materials as molecular building blocks.