Two members of the materials science and nanoengineering (MSNE) faculty at Rice University are recipients of awards from the George R. Brown School of Engineering.
Yimo Han, assistant professor of MSNE, has received the Roy E. Campbell Faculty Development Award, and Jun Lou, professor of MSNE and associate department chair, has received the Outstanding Faculty Research Award.
Han’s award goes each year to a junior tenure-track faculty member to support research efforts. It carries a prize of $10,000 per year for three consecutive years.
Her research is devoted to using electron microscopy technology to discover the atomistic structure of new materials, with applications in such fields as quantum computing and renewable energy. Her Han Lab @ Rice focuses on such material systems as two-dimensional nanomaterials, biomaterials/molecules and interfaces.
Han earned her M.S. and Ph.D. in applied physics from Cornell in 2015 and 2018, respectively. For two years she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton, and in 2020 joined the Rice faculty.
Lou’s award is given to the faculty member who “most contributed to highly impactful publications or publicly available software” in the previous five years. Among his research interests are nanomaterial synthesis, nanomechanical characterization and nanodevice fabrication for energy, environment and biomedical applications.
Lou earned his Ph.D. in materials science from Princeton in 2004 and joined the Rice faculty the following year.