Zhang recognized with prestigious award from Materials Research Society

Mechanical engineering doctoral candidate Yue Zhang has been named a Materials Research Society (MRS) Graduate Student Award (GSA) winner, as a Silver Award recipient. He was presented with the honor at the MRS 2024 Fall Meeting and Exhibit in Boston, where he also presented his research.

Zhang works alongside associate professor Arend van der Zande to engineer new electronic, photonic and mechanical devices using 2D materials as molecular building blocks. The group works, in part, to develop semiconductors for the next-generation—studying ways to make them thinner, smaller and able to achieve functionalities not currently available, such as operating faster or more efficiently. Van der Zande’s interdisciplinary research group lies at the nexus of nanotechnology, mechanics, and material physics. With affiliations in both Materials Science and Engineering and Mechanical Science and Engineering, he is a team lead in the Illinois Material Research Science and Engineering Center (I-MRSEC).

“Modern computing technologies require packing smaller and thinner semiconductor materials into chips. The limit of scaling down is predicted by atomically thin 2D materials of single atom thickness. The question is: how can we integrate 2D semiconductors into devices? One challenge is understanding the strain and stress in nearly all chip fabrication processes—how strain is applied to new materials, and how it modifies material properties,” said Zhang. “We identified the processes-induced strain in 2D materials, and we even show we can use strain to push for better performance of 2D devices. Our research helps integrate 2D materials in next-generation electronics.”

The MRS Graduate Student Awards honor and encourage graduate students whose academic achievements and current materials research display a high level of excellence and distinction. The award application is open to students who have authored or co-authored an abstract submitted for that particular MRS meeting. The MRS GSA is a prestigious and competitive award and a majority of past awardees have joined top-tier institutions as faculty members or leading researchers.

“Receiving this award is a great recognition of my research. It is also a great inspiration for me because I hope to become a professor, and many of the past winners of this award now work on the faculty at the best universities and perform really well in academia,” said Zhang, who said he also appreciated connecting with the other graduate student researchers at the meeting. This marks the second consecutive semester a student from van der Zande’s group has won this award, with fellow MechSE doctoral student Shahriar Muhammad Nahid receiving the award last spring.

Zhang earned his bachelor’s degree in applied physics in 2019 from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). He serves as the outreach ambassador for MRSEC, leading other graduate students in teaching a course to local high school students. This spring, he will also lead additional outreach activities with local middle school students from Franklin STEAM Academy.