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Two young Boston College science faculty members have received prestigious career awards from the National Science Foundation to further their research efforts over the next five years.
Assistant Professor of Chemistry Dunwei Wang and Assistant Professor of Physics Stephen Wilson have both been honored with the grants, designed to help young scientists establish their research in critical fields.
Wang, in his fourth year at BC, received a $550,000 award to advance his clean energy technology research and expand the community outreach programs of his lab.
Wang, whose work has focused on developing novel technologies for clean energy applications, has a research portfolio that includes the development of Nanonets, a flexible webbing of nano-scale wires that have shown promise in laboratory tests for use in extracting hydrogen from water.
The grant will allow Wang to expand on that research and also continue his community outreach, including a summer research collaboration with high school science teachers and an interactive display at FanFest, a pre-game festival held before Boston College home football games, where he and his researchers use toys and games to demonstrate solar and hydrogen power technologies [watch a video on this at www.youtube.com/bcchronicle].
“We’re very excited to receive this recognition and support for our research from the National Science Foundation,” said Wang. “With this support, we hope to see our technologies used to make a real impact on the world and making a real difference in people’s lives.”
Wang said community outreach is a natural outgrowth of his lab’s research into solutions that could one day provide cleaner fuel or help to build a better lithium-ion battery.
“The pure science and our work with the public are not difficult to balance because they are organically integrated,” said Wang. “The science that we pursue we hope will one day make an impact on society. That is our ultimate goal. So based on that, outreach is a part of our research activity.”
Wilson, an experimental physicist in his second year on the BC faculty, said the NSF grant will support his research into the behavior of electrons in three new classes of materials.
“The National Science Foundation funding makes a big difference for our research,” said Wilson. “This gives us a stable source of funding and we’ll be able to direct our questions into these materials for the next five years. It will facilitate a lot of interesting science.”
Wilson’s research will focus on a neutron scattering-based experimental approach to better understand magnetism in so-called spin-orbit coupled materials, including strange iridium oxide-based metals and a new class of “topological” insulators that support metallic behavior only on their surfaces, said Wilson, who will receive $600,000 from the NSF over five years.
Coupled to these investigations will be studies of a new class of iron-based high temperature superconductor where spin-orbit effects may also play an important role. All three materials stand as model systems for understanding the underlying science necessary for engineering future materials with promise in energy transport and potential computing applications, said Wilson.
Wilson said the materials his lab is studying tread a fine line between two extremes: one of independent electrons largely ignoring one another and one where electrons interact so strongly with each other that they foster collective behavior. These new classes of intermediate bandwidth systems occupy a unique regime where the coupling between an electron's atomic orbital motion and its intrinsic magnetic field (or spin) plays an important role in generating new electronic behavior.
The grant will allow Wilson to produce the materials in his BC lab and then use facilities across the country to conduct neutron scattering-based experiments that explore the fundamental electronic behavior of the materials: iron-based high temperature superconductors, iridium oxide insulators, and topological insulators.