Two CEM Faculty Receive Excellence in Undergraduate Research Mentoring Award

Prof. Jessica Winter, CEM’s Associate Director and member of IRG-2, and Prof. Rolando Valdes Aguilar, an IRG-1 faculty member and CEM’s Summer REU Director, received the 2020 Excellence in Undergraduate Research Mentoring Award from Ohio State’s Office of Undergraduate Research & Creative Inquiry. This award was created to honor individuals who have demonstrated success in mentoring undergraduates in their research and/or creative inquiry endeavors.

Created only a couple of years ago, the Excellence in Undergraduate Research Mentoring Award relies on nominations from undergraduate students at any Ohio Sate campus. Prof. Winter was nominated for the award by Thomas Porter and Prof. Valdes Aguilar was nominated for the award by Elijah Kritzell. More information about these awards can be found on the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Physics websites.

Robert Baker Wins Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award

CEM member Robert Baker, associate professor in Ohio State University’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, was named one of 14 Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholars for 2020.

The Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Awards Program supports the research and teaching careers of talented young faculty in the chemical sciences. Based on institutional nominations, the program provides an unrestricted research grant of $100,000 to faculty within the first five years of their careers. To be selected, a faculty member must have created an outstanding body of scholarship and a demonstrated commitment to education.

Robert Baker will be using this award to fund his “Visualizing Charge and Spin Dynamics at Interfaces” project. He is the fifteenth Ohio State University faculty member to win the award since the program’s inception in 1970.

CEM Faculty Member Awarded OSU’s Distinguished Scholar Award

Nandini Trivedi, professor of physics and co-leader of CEM’s IRG-1, has been awarded Picture of Professor Nandini TrivediThe Ohio State University’s prestigious Distinguished Scholar Award. The Award annually honors six faculty members who demonstrate exceptional scholarly activity, research or creative work in their respective fields.

Professor Trivedi is an expert in quantum matter, specifically condensed matter physics and ultracold atoms. Her research in IRG-1 is based on investigating the novel phases and phenomena of spin-orbit coupling in correlated materials.

Professor Trivedi is also actively involved in CEM’s outreach activities. She is the founder and program director of our Scientific Thinkers program, a partnership between CEM and Columbus City Schools to develop and teach inquiry-based science lessons to first through fifth-grade students.

Recipients of the Distinguished Scholar Award receive a $20,000 research grant and $3,000 honorarium to pursue their scholarly activity, supported by the Office of Research.

Read more here.

2018 OSU Materials Research Seed Grant Awards

We are pleased to announce that after a thorough internal and external review process, 4 Proto-IRG, 2 MTBG, and 3 EMRG  awards have been selected to fund exceptionally promising, innovative materials research on campus through the 2018 OSU Materials Research Seed Grant Program.

The OSU MRSGP provides internal research funding opportunities through three distinct Funding Tiers designed to achieve the greatest impact for seeding and advancing excellence in materials research of varying scopes.  It is jointly funded and managed by the Center for Emergent Materials (CEM), the Center for Exploration of Novel Complex Materials (ENCOMM), and the Institute for Materials Research (IMR).

2018 Proto-IRG Grants
Proto-IRG Grants ($80,000 each) form new Interdisciplinary Research Groups (IRGs) that could potentially be incorporated into the renewal proposal of Center for Emergent Materials, an NSF Materials Research Science and Engineering Center, in 2019.

  • Structure, Defects and Emergent Properties at Magnetic Interfaces
    Jinwoo Hwang, Department of Materials Science and Engineering
  • Metamorphic Narrow Gap Antimonide Materials for Topological Insulators
    Sanjay Krishna, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
  • Tunable Ferromagnetic and Antiferromagnetic Spintronics Based on Graphene Quantum Hall States
    Jeanie Lau, Department of Physics
  • Anionic Functional Materials
    Yiying Wu, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry

2018 Multidisciplinary Team Building Grants
MTBG Grants ($60,000 each) support multidisciplinary materials research teams to compete effectively for federal block-funding opportunities

  • Sulfide-Based Lithium Superionic Conductors (LISICON) for All Solid-State Energy Storage Device
    Jung Hyun Kim, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
  • MOCVD Growth and Material Properties of Earth Abundant Semiconducting ZnSnN
    Hongping Zhao, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

2018 Exploratory Materials Research Grants
EMRG Grants ($40,000 each) enable nascent and innovative materials research to emerge to the point of being competitive for external funding

  • Mechanoelectric effects on bone mineralization as a stiffness modulator
    Hanna Cho, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
  • Investigation of Boron-Based III-V Compound Semiconductors
    Tyler Grassman, Department of Materials Science and Engineering
  • Establishing Computational and Experimental Frameworks to Elucidate Magnetoelastic Interactions in Smart Metamaterials
    Ryan Harne, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

CEM Researchers Awarded NSF iSuperSeed2

Ohio State researchers have been awarded a prestigious iSuperSeed2 award to explore new materials for the future of quantum information systems by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The iSuperSeed2 grant, awarded as a supplement to the Center for Emergent Materials (CEM) at Ohio State, an NSF Materials Research in Science and Engineering Centers (MRSEC), was the single award granted in the area of quantum information.

Professors Daniel Gauthier, Jay Gupta, Ezekiel Johnston-Halperin, and Roland Kawakami in the Department of Physics are collaborating with Prof. Michael Flatté at the University of Iowa on the project, bringing together researchers with expertise in 2D materials (IRG-2: Gupta, Kawakami), spin and magnetism (IRG-3: Flatté, Johnston-Halperin), and quantum measurement (Gauthier). In addition, collaborations outside the iSuperSeed2 team include recent Discovery Theme hires Profs. Chun Ning “Jeanie” Lau (Physics) and Marc Bockrath (Physics).

The program focuses on using the weak interactions between mechanically stacked materials, known as van der Waals bonds, to develop a universal approach to quantum transduction (the transfer of quantum information between two different materials). This van der Waals bonding is commonly found in 2D materials such as graphene and hexagonal boron nitride (hBN), leading to the creating of “van der Waals heterostructures” where single to few layers of 2D crystal can be mechanically stacked to fine tune layer-to-layer coupling.

As a result, van der Waals bonds allow for a “Goldilocks” level of interaction between two materials, where the quantum interactions are neither too weak nor too strong, and are present in materials ranging from insulators, to conductors, to magnets, to superconductors. Ohio State researchers plan to exploit this flexibility to explore a wide variety of materials for applications in future quantum-based technologies.