OUR
NEWEST
FACULTY
OUR RESEARCHERS ARE PART OF A HISTORIC SEMICONDUCTOR LEGACY THAT
BEGAN WITH ENGINEERING GIANTS JOHN BARDEEN, NICK HOLONYAK JR., AND
CHIH-TANG SAH, WHOSE GROUNDBREAKING WORK HELPED LAUNCH AND ADVANCE TODAY’S INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY REVOLUTION. THEY AND THEIR
ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING COLLEAGUES FROM THE STORIED ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING RESEARCH LAB—THE PRECURSOR TO THE MICRO & NANOTECHNOLOGY
LAB—SET A STANDARD OF EXCELLENCE THAT TODAY’S FACULTY STRIVE TO
MEET. WE PROUDLY INTRODUCE THREE NEW FACULTY.
WENJUAN ZHU is identifying the unique electronic and photonic properties of 2D materials and fabricating nanoscale devices. She and her students are taking advantage of the
high carrier mobility of metallic 2D materials like graphene to build plasmonic devices
and solar cells with transparent electrodes. For semiconducting 2D materials, such as
MoS2 and WSe2, they are making sub-10nm transistors for computing. Zhu and her
group are also combining 2D materials with traditional semiconducting materials and
exploring their applications in computation, communications, energy, and medical areas.
Before joining the Illinois faculty in August 2014, Zhu spent 11 years at IBM, where she
made key contributions to 65 nm and 32 nm CMOS technology and explored the fundamental properties of 2D materials like graphene and layered transition metal dichalcogenides (LTMD) and made devices and circuits.
CAN BAYRAM is developing efficient, high-power & compact ultra-violet AlGaInN LEDs to
detect and eliminate biological agents like anthrax, plague, and ebola, and may be used to
enable clean drinking water in underdeveloped areas. He and his students are also creating light sources that are tunable from UV to visible (200-750nm) wavelengths for general
lighting, visualization, and biological applications. In the electronics area, he and his group
are creating GaN-based transistors for next generation power transistors.
Before joining the Illinois faculty in August 2014, Bayram spent three years at IBM, where
he was part of the team that developed a record-breaking specific power solar cell, which
was featured on the cover of Advanced Energy Materials in May 2013. Bayram also created
a technique to grow GaN material that is compatible with conventional CMOS fabrication
technology.
AREND VAN DER ZANDE, who joined the Illinois faculty in August 2015, is investigating
the properties of 2-dimensional (2D) materials and building novel devices from them.
While his group has grown isolated layers of molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), their goal is
to grow large-scale uniform MoS2 and other 2D materials. They’ve begun building a
metal-organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) system at MNTL that can produce
uniform 2D materials on four-inch wafers.
Van der Zande earned his doctorate in physics at Cornell University. He spent four years
as a post-doctoral researcher at Columbia University, where he isolated and engineered
the first graphene mechanical membrane. Because of its strength and flexibility, he and
colleagues were able to build nanomechanical systems like electrostatically tunable drumhead resonators and impermeable gas membranes.
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