Outstanding materials research
On this year’s Materials Day, the Department of Materials will award the Materials Research Prize to a talented young researcher for the first time. The prize winner is Bozhi Tian, Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago.
New and better materials play an essential role in the development of innovative technologies. To underline the importance of this research area, the Department of Materials has launched a new prize that will be awarded for the first time at this year’s Materials Day.
“With the Materials Research Prize for Young Investigators, we would like to acknowledge the achievements of young researchers who have not yet firmly established themselves in academia,” explains Ralph Spolenak, Professor of Nanometallurgy and Head of the Department of Materials. The response to the first call for nominations was very positive: “We received applications from most of the world’s leading universities.”
Hard and soft combined
Bozhi Tian, Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago, triumphed over the stiff competition. Tian researches interactions between biological and electronic systems; for example, he examines how the behaviour of cells can be mimicked with semiconducting nanomaterials or how special nanomaterials can be used to measure the electrical conductivity of cells.
“Tian combines hard and soft materials in his research and connects the living with the lifeless,” explains Spolenak. “The bridge between these two poles is a major area in today’s materials science, one that is not only important for medicine, but also enables interesting applications in many other areas.”
The new prize is worth CHF 10,000 and will be awarded every two years. It is financed by the revenue received by the department from an emeritus professor’s lucrative patent.
Materials Day 2017
The Materials Day is held every two years by the Department of Materials. Researchers from the department as well as some external guests give short lectures presenting new research results, providing a compact overview of their research field. On this year’s Materials Day, all the department’s disciplines will be represented under the title “Materials Today, Tomorrow, and Beyond”. The spectrum of topics is accordingly varied: new metal alloys and functional surfaces will be discussed, as will complex liquids, innovative biopolymers and magnetoelectric materials.