Four faculty researchers win NSF CAREER Awards

Four assistant professors at Binghamton University received CAREER Awards from the National Science Foundation in 2021-2022. The prestigious five-year grants of roughly $500,000 support early-career researchers who have the potential to serve as academic role models.

The projects supported by this year’s CAREER awardees will address pressing challenges related to batteries, cloud computing, nanobots and soft electronics.

Chemist Hao Liu will continue his research into sodium-ion batteries.

Lithium-ion batteries power smartphones and tablets, laptops and electric cars. But the silvery metal lithium isn’t so easy to obtain. Sodium-ion batteries are an affordable and promising alternative.

“It’s very cheap and much more abundant than lithium,” Liu explains.

Batteries of this type would be a boon for the growing renewable energy sector, since the forces that generate power are intermittent.

“The sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow, and this requires energy storage on a much larger scale,” Liu says.

Computer scientist Seunghee Shin conducts research that may reduce the communication time between smart devices and the cloud.

His idea is to shorten the distance between devices and the information they need by creating memory caches along the route, which would make cloud-based programs run faster. The innovations rely on technology such as SmartNICs and non-volatile memory, or NVM.

A network interface card, or NIC, is a hardware component that connects a computer to a network, almost always using Ethernet. NVM can retain stored information in memory chips even after the power is removed.

“We’ve never used the SmartNIC this way,” he says. “I just decided to test one to see what would happen. So everything is a challenge.”

Kaiyan Yu, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, hopes to advance nanorobots.

Because of the size involved current techniques cannot independently manipulate large numbers of nanoscale objects precisely (the way you might see in a sci-fi movie).

Yu will study ways to overcome these limitations.

She hopes to manipulate micro- and nanoparticles with controlled three-dimensional poses and characteristics into functional devices, interconnects and other useful components for a variety of applications, such as building nanorobots that can deliver drugs to cells.

“Right now, because of manufacturing limits, it’s really hard to build this kind of nanorobot with a lot of sensors, strong actuators and on-board batteries, and also have them communicate with each other,” Yu says.

Mechanical engineer Pu Zhang conducts research that could advance soft electronics, devices that can bend or stretch without breaking.

One challenge is finding materials that are highly conductive like metals yet remain super-stretchable.

Zhang has an intriguing solution to the problem: Use liquid metal networks in rubber that can deform easily while remaining highly conductive.

The project will build on experiments that Zhang has done on gallium-indium alloy, which has a melting point around 15 degrees Celsius (60 degrees Fahrenheit). That means it is liquid at room temperature. Using a fabrication process Zhang developed, he was able to produce liquid metal network composites with an ultra-low amount of liquid metal, but still maintain high electrical conductivity.