NSF CAREER Award granted to MATSE faculty

NSF CAREER Award granted to MATSE faculty

University Park, Pa. --- Qing Wang, assistant professor of materials science and engineering and Virgina and Philip Walker Faculty Fellow in the department, has been awarded a National Science Foundation CAREER award for his proposal, "Development of Novel Electroactive Polymer Assemblies."

This five-year grant is one of the NSF's most prestigious awards, and is intended to support the development of future academic leaders.

Wang received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2000 and was a postdoctoral research fellow at Cornell University from 2000 to 2002. He joined the faculty of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Penn State in July 2002. Since his arrival, he has built a research group and laboratory facilities to develop new nanostructured polymeric materials.

Electroactive polymers are becoming crucial components in advanced electronic devices such as light emitting diodes for display applications, thin film transistors for low-cost and ultra-dense logic and memory circuits, and photodiodes for optical information processing. Combining advantages such as ease of processing, flexibility, versatility of molecular structure and tunable physical properties, organic polymer-based wires, gates, transistors, and storage devices not only hold promise in the continuing technological revolution, but also are entering our daily lives a variety of ways. Smart tags that allow automated supermarket checkout, novel consumer products such as ultra-light, flexible displays for portable electronic devices and wall-size television screens are but a few of the possibilities.

In Wang's program, a new generation of electroactive polymer assemblies will be developed via rational design, molecular engineering and hierarchical assembly. The nanometer-scale control of molecular organization will likely lead to materials with unparalleled physical properties for applications in energy storage, energy harvesting, and advanced microelectronics. This research program is a collaborative effort that will include an educational outreach program with Penn State Public Broadcasting and contributions from faculty at Penn State including Drs. James Runt and Qiming Zhang.