Choi, Wang win highly competitive MRS award

MechSE doctoral students Michael Cai Wang and Jonghyun Choi were recently awarded with Materials Research Society (MRS) Graduate Student Awards (GSA). The two were silver GSA recipients.

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.

“MRS GSA is a very competitive award. About 30 students from more than 5,000 abstracts submitted are selected as finalists, and a majority of awardees have joined top-tier institutions as faculty members or leading researchers,” said Assistant Professor SungWoo Nam, advisor to Choi and Wang. Nam was a winner of the gold GSA from MRS in 2011.

Choi received the award for his abstract, “Stimulation and Recording of Optogenetically Encoded Skeletal Muscle Cells based on Optically Transparent Graphene Field-Effect Transistors.” In his paper he described how, using various frequencies of light at different intervals, they can optically stimulate optogenetically encoded cells based on transparent graphene field-effect transistors and simultaneously record this stimulation electrically and optically. This work was done in collaboration with Yongdeok Kim and Gelson Pagan from Professor Rashid Bashir’s group in Bioengineering, and Yerim Kim in Nam’s group.

In Wang’s abstract, “0D/1D/2D Meta-Materials – Large-Scale, Highly-Ordered Self-Assembly of 0D/1D Plasmonic Nanoparticle Arrays on Deterministically Deformed Monolayer 2D Materials Templates,” he discussed the concept of two-dimensional material templates, made of deformed graphene and transition metal chalcogenide monolayers, that can be used to induce the self-assembly of various nanoparticles into specific architectures, and its impact on nanomanufacturing. This work was done in collaboration with Matthew Gole and Wayne Lin from Professor Catherine Murphy’s group in Chemistry, and Juyoung Leem in Nam’s group.

Both students will be graduating and pursuing their own careers this summer. Wang will be joining the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of South Florida as an assistant professor. Choi will begin a research engineering position with Intel Corp.