2024 Materials Today Rising Star Award Winners

The Materials Today ‘Rising Star Awards’ recognize researchers in materials science and engineering who have demonstrated themselves to be exceptionally capable researchers with the potential to become future leaders in the field.

The nomination for 2024 Materials Today ‘Rising Star Awards’ was closed earlier this year. This year, there are in total 7 winners from four different research fields.

Each of the winners are listed below. Please enjoy this article collection which includes selected articles from the award winners.

Category: Biomaterials

1. Can you tell us a little about your research interests? Biomaterials, Bioelectronics, Soft Materials, Advanced Manufacturing, Microsystems, Electronic Materials, and Photonic Materials

2. What excites you about biomaterials research? Research in materials sciences could open revolutionary opportunities to address unmet clinical needs and improve human healthcare and sustainability.

3. What are you currently researching? We are currently focusing on both fundamental and applied study of soft materials and nanomaterials, including assembly and manufacturing approaches to enable hybrid integration of multimaterials towards high-performance electronic and photonic systems, and the development of new technology that can intelligently immerse electronics and photonics into biological systems.

4. What are your future research goals? Bridging fundamental advancements in materials sciences with societal impacts.

1. Can you tell us a little about your research interests? My research focuses on developing nature-inspired soft materials from a chemistry perspective, particularly hydrogels, coatings, and biointerfaces made from polycatecholic materials for applications in disease diagnosis and treatment. Catecholic and polyphenolic moieties play a key role in driving molecular interactions in nature, facilitating adhesion, cohesion, coloration, and other functional properties in organic materials, such as mussel foot proteins and melanin biopigments. By mimicking these natural processes, my goal is to create innovative biomaterials that address unmet needs in healthcare.

2. What excites you about biomaterials research? What excites me most about biomaterials research is the potential to create materials that mimic natural processes, enabling seamless interactions with biological systems. This capability opens up opportunities for innovative solutions in healthcare, which I find incredibly inspiring. Additionally, the interdisciplinary nature of biomaterials research is particularly appealing to me. By integrating chemistry, biology, materials science, engineering, and medicine, it creates a dynamic environment for discovery. This collaborative approach brings together diverse perspectives and expertise, leading to breakthroughs that may not be achievable in isolation. The prospect that our combined efforts to improve human health can lead to revolutionary advancements is what truly motivates me to be part of this research area.

3. What are you currently researching? Currently, I am expanding my research from adhesive biomaterials and coatings to functional hydrogel-based devices. Beyond their well-established versatile adhesive properties, the optical characteristics of polycatecholic materials have opened up new avenues for exploration, enabling broad-spectrum UV-Vis-NIR light absorption for biomarker marking and photothermal therapy in biomedical applications. To achieve this, I am focused on developing photoresponsive soft actuators and deep tissue photoactivating hydrogel devices that can closely interact with living tissues, paving the way for personalized diagnosis and therapy.

4. What are your future research goals? My ultimate future research goal is to translate my findings into real-world applications. Although synthetic materials often perform well in laboratory settings, the complexity of biological systems presents significant challenges when applying these materials in vivo. To address this issue, I prioritize close communication with clinicians and collaboration with experts from various fields. I believe that by working together, we can develop revolutionary biomaterials that are not only effective in the laboratory but also suitable for use in clinical settings, ultimately improving patient outcomes and advancing healthcare solutions.

Category: Energy Conversion & Storage

1. Can you tell us a little about your research interests? My research interests center on the concept of novel materials design and discovery. I am particularly driven by understanding the fundamentals—delving into the why behind existing knowledge. Once these foundations are clear, I apply the “why not” question to push myself and my team toward designing and discovering new materials to solve specific challenges and achieve targeted properties. While complete success is not guaranteed, this journey often leads to new insights into material behavior and expands our scientific knowledge. My current interest and "why not” mindset are focused on the design of novel MXenes and defect engineering to tune their chemistries and properties.

2. What excites you about energy research? Energy Conversion and Storage: What excites and motivates me in this field is its universality and frontier nature, demanding constant innovation to meet global demands. Our modern life as we know it, with all smart devices and interconnected technologies, would be impossible without energy storage devices. We must constantly design and employ advanced nanomaterials to keep our planet livable for our species, contributing to a cleaner environment for future generations.

3. What are you currently researching? My research focuses on materials discovery for clean and extreme environments. My lab focuses on 2D transition metal carbides and nitrides, known as MXenes. We design new MXene chemistries, control and engineer their defects and make nano assemblies and heterostructures to precisely tune their properties for targeted applications.

4. What are your future research goals? My future goals are to carry forward my “why not” mindset, continually asking how we can design materials (that currently do not exist) with enhanced properties to meet emerging needs and adapt to the challenges of the future.

1. Can you tell us a little about your research interests? My research interests focus on developing advanced electrolytes and novel electrode materials for high-energy batteries. We have developed a family of soft solvating electrolytes for batteries operating under extreme conditions (high voltage (≥4.5 V), fast-charging (≤15-min), charging/discharging over a wide temperature range (±60oC), and non-flammability). (Nature, 2023, 614, 694-700 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05627-8). This finding provides a practical drop-in solution for the Li-ion batteries for next-generation electric vehicles. We also developed a family of earth-abundant lithium-halides cathodes (LiCl-LiI-graphite, LiCl-LiBr-graphite, LiBr-graphite, and LiCl-graphite) as a new class of cathode materials. These materials are of extremely low cost and contain no transition metal. Moreover, they deliver material energy densities that exceed the state-of-the-art metal oxides LiMO2 (M = Ni, Mn, or Co). Dr. Xu has been interviewed by MIT Review, Joule, and spotlighted as “Reversible halogen cathodes for high energy lithium batteries.”

2. What excites you about energy research? My first encounter with scientific research was in 2013 through the Student Research Training Program at Zhejiang University. Initially, I was interested in solar cells, specifically the conversion of solar energy into electrical energy. However, at that time, the leading solar cell company, Suntech Power, went bankrupt, and solar-generated electricity was often referred to as “waste electricity.” This situation made me realize the importance of energy storage, so I chose energy storage as my research focus during my Ph.D. Fortunately, this decision coincided with the recent explosive growth in lithium battery technology.

3. What are you currently researching? In 2023, I joined the Department of Chemistry at City University of Hong Kong as a Principal Investigator (PI) and started my research group (https://jijianxu.com/ opens in new tab/window). We are integrating innovations in both electrode chemistry and electrolyte design to develop sustainable electrochemical energy storage devices with higher power and energy.

4. What are your future research goals? My long-term goal is to develop batteries that can operate stably under extreme temperatures, such as those on Mars.

Category: Materials Data Science & AI

1. Can you tell us a little about your research interests? Our research is driven by the energy transition, which requires the development of low-cost, earth-abundant materials for energy conversion and storage. We model a variety of different electrode materials under applied bias, such as two-dimensional materials, transition-metal oxides, transition-metal sulfides, and single-atom catalysts, with the aim of gaining dedicated mechanistic insights into the conversion processes of oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon-based molecules into valuable fuels. To this end, we apply electronic structure calculations, force field-based simulations, data-driven approaches, and descriptor-based analysis to capture the complexity of elementary processes at electrified solid/ liquid interfaces. Further information can also be found on our website: https://www.exner-group.com/ opens in new tab/window

2. What excites you about Materials Data Science & AI research? Data science and AI are attracting enormous interest in materials science research. The application of these methods allows us to expand the parameter space in our theoretical models and thus obtain more robust conclusions. As evident from the attached representative articles published in Elsevier journals, my group has pioneered the construction of volcano plots based on data-driven methods, which fall into the category of "data science" (see Mater Today Energy 2023 & Chem Catal 2024).

3. What are you currently researching? Currently, we have a plethora of different projects running in the group (for an overview, please have a look here: https://www.exner-group.com/research opens in new tab/window . I would like to highlight one of these projects, which is related to my answer of point 3. We are interested in a fundamental understanding of the electrocatalysis of MXenes, two-dimensional transition-metal carbides and nitrides, M2X (X = C or N), with a pronounced potential for energy conversion and storage applications. In a current manuscript submission, we have found that MXenes form single-atom centers reminiscent of a single atom catalyst (SAC), using the applied electrode potential as a probe to transform the surface into a SAC-like structure without the need for the addition of foreign metal heteroatoms. The option to form SAC-like sites by applying an electrode potential may enormously simplify synthetic routes toward the formation of next-generation electrocatalysts based on SACs, and the application of novel SAC-like sites for catalytic processes is a topic of high relevance to materials science and electrochemistry.

4. What are your future research goals? I am going to extend my research on the "in situ formation" of SAC-like sites with application in catalysis or energy applications. I want to understand which materials are capable of forming active and selective SAC-like sites and how these SAC-like sites can be exploited to enable breakthroughs in energy conversion processes.

1. Can you tell us a little about your research interests? My research interests are very broad and diverse. Briefly, I am interested in new materials for computing, sensing and energy transduction. Our group does not discriminate about the type, composition or form of the material. The only criteria for doing research is that the material should be new, it must have some interesting property which can be exploited in one of the above applications with a transformative impact. We have done this with a reasonable amount of success for a couple of different applications namely in electronics i.e. low-power and extreme environment computing as well as in ultrathin photonics and optoelectronics enabling light confinement at extreme scales for useful devices.

2. What excites you about Materials Data Science & AI research? What really excites me about the intersection of materials science and AI is that it is the easiest to achieve a closed iterative loop of self-propelling technology. In other words, materials science is key to advanced, energy efficient AI hardware which in turn will be used to search for new materials for more advanced AI hardware and so the loop continues. Many people think this is science fiction but in fact our materials community is perhaps the closest to achieving this seemingly science fiction type vision. Closer than any other scientific community. Therefore I think this is a very exciting time to be in materials science especially if you are into discovery of new materials using AI or using new materials to build better AI hardware. I fall in the latter category.

3. What are you currently researching? As I mentioned before, we are researching many different materials for many different applications. One research area that is most promising in my view is novel nitride and chalcogenide ferroelectric materials. Their synthesis, properties and device applications. Ferroelectrics have the potential to be the ultimate materials for information storage at low-energy for indefinite periods and use them for very fast and energy efficient computing. So that is a current research area which is really exciting to me.

4. What are your future research goals? Many. Hard to list all of them. But I will elaborate on a couple of areas where I would really like to branch out and contribute IF there is an opportunity.

   1. Tunable superconductors. I think superconductors are amazing materials and as a class of electronic materials they have been evergreen in terms of research since their discovery in 1911. However, everyday applications of superconductors are still niche and few. But I think this can change and this will likely change in the years to come. To do that one has to find a way and make tunable superconductors over wafer scale i.e produce entire 6-8" silicon wafers with tunable superconducting devices on them (preferably the cuprate superconductors) and I think that would revolutionize many things.

   2. Nucleic acid based materials. Once again a lot of research has happened in nucleic acid based materials for soft matter, biochemistry, catalysis and drug delivery. I think there might be some very interesting opportunities for nucleic acid based materials for electronics and optics.

Category: Sustainability

1. Can you tell us a little about your research interests? Currently, we are developing catalysts and devices for CO2 conversion into valuable products.

2. What excites you about Sustainability research? The rapid industrialization and population growth significantly increase CO2 emissions, resulting in various ecological and environmental problems. Our research aims to develop electrocatalytic process to convert CO2 into value-added chemicals and fuel. This process strategy can be driven by renewable energy sources such as solar cells and wind power, thus having the potential to close the carbon cycle.

3. What are you currently researching? We are actively engaged in catalyst development and electrochemical device design. Developing high-performance catalysts is crucial for enhancing selectivity and productivity in CO2 reduction reactions. To apply this process on an industrial scale, it's also essential to design devices that deliver high current while maintaining high selectivity and stability.

4. What are your future research goals? Our goal is to develop catalysts that convert CO2 into methanol and other hydrocarbons with high selectivity, energy efficiency, and carbon utilization efficiency. With advancements in renewable energy and carbon capture technologies, we aim for electrochemical CO2 reduction to become commonplace in commodity chemical production, contributing to carbon neutrality.