Michael Yartsev appointed Searle Scholar for 2016 -- Prof. Yartsev, recruited by BNNI and residing in Bioengineering and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, will receive $300K to support his research into the neurology of habit formation using free-flying bats. Three out of the fifteen winners are from Cal -- Go Bears!
PECASE won by Sayeef Salahuddin -- Prof. Salahuddin is one of three Berkeley faculty to win this year's Presidential Early Career Award. His lab in EECS develops new devices based on nanomagnetic logic switching and the potential of negative capacitance for very low power memory applications.
Paul Alivisatos wins Dan David Prize -- Prof. Alivisatos recently moved from the director position at LBNL to take on the Vice Chancellor for Research role here on campus, and is sharing this year's Dan David Foundation Prize for nanoscience research with Chad Mirkin (Northwestern) and John Pendry (ICL).
Nanowire Lasers -- Prof. Peidong Yang's lab has developed a new method of fabricating nano-sized lasers that have only inorganic (carbon-free) ingredients. These new lasers will have both optoelectronic and solar cell applications.
Tilting Nano Magnets could be just to trick to allow for on-chip memory -- Prof. Sayeef Salahuddin's lab has developed a novel magnetic material and a way to arrange it onto integrated circuits that could lead to computers that turn on instantly and use much less power when doing so.
Department of Energy E.O. Lawrence Award won by BNNI faculty -- Co-Director Carolyn Bertozzi and Prof. Peidong Yang (who is co-director of the Kavli ENSI), were among nine mid-career scientists honored with the award named for UC Berkeley's first Nobel Laureate and the founder of LBNL, in recognition of their 'transformative discoveries' in nanomaterials. Four out of the nine 2014 winners have an association with Cal -- Go Bears!
Graphene-based microphones and speakers inspired by bat echolocation -- Prof. Alex Zettl, Co- Director of BNNI, and Prof. Michael Yartsev, our most recent hire, are collaborating on a project to make mic and speaker diaphragms that are one atom thick and will be able to speak and hear at bat-level frequencies. This will help in the development of new types of communications devices.
BNNI Co-Director Alex Zettl awarded Foresight Institute's 2013 Feynman Prize -- Prof. Zettl, from Physics and a senior scientist at LBNL, is recognized as a pioneer in carbon nanotube research with this award given to one experimentalist and one theoretician each year. His NEMS fabrication inventions will lead to the development of complex devices in a number of fields.
Omar Yaghi and Peidong Yang have been named co-directors of the new Kavli Energy NanoSciences Institute which is endowed with $10M from the Kavli Foundation and matching funds from the Philomathia Foundation and Heising-Simons Fellows program. This new institute will build on the new connections among nano-related researchers across the campus and LBNL.
Paul Alivisatos appointed Samsung Distinguished Chair in Nanoscience -- Prof. Alivisatos, current Director of LBNL and a founder of BNNI, takes this newly endowed position, recognizing his fundamental contributions to our knowledge of nanocrystals and quantum dots.
Bioengineer Sanjay Kumar wins another Young Investigator award -- Prof. Kumar continues his successes with the journal Stem Cells Young Investigator Award for groundbreaking research into the regulation of neural stem cells. A global jury judged his paper on hippocampalneural stem cells to be of worldwide significance.
BNNI Co-Director Carolyn Bertozzi elected to the Institute of Medicine -- Prof. Bertozzi, from Chemistry and MCB, is recognized by the IOM for her outstanding professional achievement and commitment to service with one of the highest national honors in the fields of health and medicine. UC Berkeley can now boast more than a dozen faculty IOM members.
Former BNNI / UC Discovery Fellow Tom Yuzvinsky now manages UC Santa Cruz optofluidics lab -- Tom did his Ph.D. here in the Zettl lab in Physics and served as our industrial alliances coordinator. He is now manager of the Nanofabrication Lab at the W.M. Keck Center for Nanoscale Optofluidics at UC Santa Cruz.
Newly discovered characteristics of Graphene will lead to new devices -- In the 30 July issue of the journal Science researcher Mike Crommie along with our grad students Niv Levy, Kacey Meaker, and others show that graphene's electronic properties can be controlled through strain, confirming in the lab predictions made over 10 years ago. This opens possibilities for a new field of 'straintronics' device engineering.
Bioengineer Sanjay Kumar receives PECASE -- Prof. Kumar tops his NIH award (see below) with the highest honor bestowed upon early career scientists by the U.S. gov't. Kumar was nominated by the Department of Defense.
Graphene's potential applications demonstrated by UCB physicists -- In the 11 June issue of Nature our nano researchers Feng Wang, Yuanbo Zhang, and Tsung-Ta Tang from the Crommie and Zettl labs show that a graphene bilayer can have a tunable bandgap, which opens up a new range of engineering applications and physics investigations.
ACS educational video contest won by Cal grad students --the American Chemical Society's call for short videos that explain nano to a broad audience awarded their Critic's Choice and People's Choice awards to The Nano Song , which was produced by our own NSE students pursuing Ph.D.s in EECS and AST.
Material Scientist Ting Xu pioneers polymer self-assembly -- Prof. Xu's work in collaboration with U. Mass/Amherst's Thomas Russell has found a way around the limitations of photolithography to produce ordered arrays that remain defect-free over large areas. Implications for data storage: 250 DVDs will fit on a surface the size of a quarter.
Opto-electronics Researcher Constance Chang-Hasnain named National Security Science and Engineering Fellow -- Chair of our own NSE Graduate Group, Prof. Chang-Hasnain is one of eight newly awarded distinguished faculty recognized for long-term basic research on challenging technical problems of strategic national security importance.
Bioengineer Sanjay Kumar wins Young Innovator award from NIH -- Prof. Kumar's research program combines approaches from biophysics, systems biology, and oncology to study the molecular mechanisms cells use to sense and communicate.
Compressing light for improved optical communications -- Optics researchers in Xiang Zhang's lab have proposed a way to significantly improve optical fiber, overcoming a major hurdle in the race for a compact optical transistor.
New metamaterials bend light backwards -- A new Nature paper by postdocs in the SINAM lab describes nanomaterials that achieve a negative refraction coefficient.
Golden Scales: NEMS Sensor Can Be Used to Weigh Individual Atoms and Molecules -- Researchers in COINS have fashioned a nanoscale device sensitive enough to measure the mass of a single atom of gold.
Single Nanotube Makes World's Smallest Radio -- Physicists in Alex Zettl's COINS lab have built a radio from a single carbon nanotube, just 101 years after the first music transmissions by radio.
Chemist Peidong Yang wins National Science Foundation's Waterman Award -- The NSF's top prize for young researchers goes to our own head advisor for the Graduate Group in Nanoscale Science & Engineering.
A Nano-Scale Lab With Societal-Scale Impact --CITRIS's new headquarters.
A Hail Mary against global warming peril Cal grad student working on thin solar panel
Researchers develop technique to use dirty silicon, could pave way for cheaper solar energy
Nanoscale Tubing Assembles Itself Instantly
