MRS Award Recipients Lightning Talks and Panel Discussion

Monday, May 9
5:30 pm – 7:00 pm
Hawaiʻi Convention Center, Level 4, Kalakaua Ballroom B

During this single celebratory session for awards, MRS Award recipients presented well-formed ideas on their respective research. Award recipients served as panelists following the aired presentations to answer various questions from the audience.

Moderator: Suveen Mathaudhu, MRS Awards Committee Chair

Innovation in Materials Characterization Award

Annamaria Petrozza, Italian Institute of Technology

For the development and innovative use of time-resolved carrier dynamics measurements, from sub-picoseconds to milliseconds, to fundamentally advance our understanding of the photo-physics of metal-halide perovskites, leading to materials and devices of improved stability

Defects Activity in Metal Halide Perovskites

Metal-halide perovskites present exceptional optoelectronic properties such as large light absorption coefficients, long free charge carrier diffusion lengths, and ambipolar character. They are apparently protected by what has been often described as a “defect tolerance” of these materials which has allowed to achieve, relatively quickly, highly performing devices. In this talk, Petrozza described the role of defects in the photo-chemistry of metal halide perovskites.

Mid-Career Researcher Award

Molly Stevens, Imperial College London

For innovative biosensing nanomaterials technologies for point-of-care disease diagnostics

Designing Biomaterials To Repair The Body and Detect Diseases Earlier

This talk provided an overview of our multidisciplinary approach to elucidate the interfaces between living and non-living matter, and how we use this fundamental knowledge to design innovative materials and technologies with impactful applications in regenerative medicine, advanced therapeutic delivery and disease diagnostics. We engineer simple conceptually novel biosensing approaches using designer bio-nanomaterials for ultrasensitive diagnostic assays that are simple, cost-effective and easy deploy to the point-of-care. We are exploiting the sensing capabilities of nanoparticles to engineer paper-based lateral flow immunoassays (LFIAs) for the detection of infectious diseases such as HIV, Ebola, tuberculosis and Covid-19, and we can integrate our assays with smartphone technology for patient self-monitoring, geographical tagging and epidemic surveillance. Harnessing our knowledge of the bio-interfaces, we also engineer complex 3D architectures with spatially arranged biochemical cues and cell interfacing nanoneedles for multiplexed intracellular biosensing at sub-cellular resolution and modulation of biological processes. Stevens explored how these versatile technologies can be applied to transformative biomedical innovations.

MRS Impact Award

Kwadwo Osseo-Asare, The Pennsylvania State University

For sustained contributions to building a global materials science and engineering community that spans continents from Africa to the Americas

Kεji tsɔ kome kpee kɔɔyɔɔ lε ekuɔ (Ga, Ghana). When a single tree encounters strong wind, it breaks.

In this presentation, Osseo-Asare briefly traced his journey from Achimota School, Ghana, through the University of California, Berkeley, to his current position at The Pennsylvania State University. In his research, the Achimota logo of the piano keyboard has stimulated an attraction to seemingly contradictory systems, e.g., the view that minerals are natural materials and materials are engineered minerals. He shared the motivation behind his interest in exploring the concept of indirection, characteristic of African proverbial discourse as a tool in promoting conceptual understanding and creativity in teaching and learning materials science and engineering. Finally, he celebrated the fact that one cannot do science alone and that science has no boundaries.

Outstanding Early Career Investigator Award

Prineha Narang, Harvard University

For critical advances in the understanding of materials physics, optical sciences, and topology for the prediction and design of quantum materials

Illuminating Quantum Matter

Prineha Narang presented work on theoretical and computational approaches to describe excited-states in quantum materials, and predicting emergent states created by strongly non-equilibrium external drives. Understanding the role of such nonequilibrium light-matter interactions in the regime of correlated electronic systems is of paramount importance to fields of study across materials physics, quantum optics and quantum chemistry. With our framework, we can access correlated electron-photon and photon-phonon dynamics. Further, Narang showed selected examples of the work on driving quantum matter far out-of-equilibrium to control the coupled electronic and vibrational degrees-of-freedom, and a pathway to link these with transport phenomena.

MRS Postdoctoral Award

Aditya Sood, Stanford University

For pioneering correlated dynamic structure and transport studies, and the discovery of a new electrically-triggered metastable phase in an operating device

Towards Ultrafast Atomistic "Movies" of Operating Nano-electronic Devices

Identifying the ultimate limits of speed and energy consumption in computing devices is a grand engineering challenge. Addressing this challenge requires fundamentally new ways of visualizing how nanoscale materials respond transiently to electrical perturbations on fast timescales. Sood talked about a new type of ultrafast "camera" that enables direct, concurrent measurements of both atomic structure and electronic transport inside operating devices. Using this method, we uncover unusual aspects of the electrically-triggered insulator-metal transition in vanadium dioxide, which could have important implications for energy-efficient computing.