Congratulations to Dr Yen-Hung Lin on winning the MRS Student Gold Award at the MRS Fall Conference in December!

Yen is on the very left in the front row in the photo of the award winners.  You can read his account below, and more about the award here.

“Our work focuses on low-temperature solution-processable metal oxide materials for large-area electronics. The key development during my PhD is exploring high-quality ultra-thin layers (< 5 nm) of various metal oxides could be grown with sub-nanometre accuracy via spin-casting at temperatures as low as 180-degree C in air. In this work, we were able to demonstrate the existence of energy quantisation in ultra-thin layers of various metal oxides. The ability to grow low-dimensional all-oxide superlattices with tuneable optical and electronic characteristics led to the demonstration of the first ever oxide superlattice transistors from solution and to date holds the record in terms of field-effect mobility for transistors fabricated from solution at temperatures < 200-degree C. Importantly, the methods developed and proposed here are generic and applicable, in principle, to other materials combinations and could have important implications to the development of “synthetic” superlattice materials for application in next generation high-performance flexible electronics.

“When I heard the news about me receiving the gold award, I was so thrilled, especially that the 3-4 year PhD work is now recognised by one of the largest research communities. Also, I just cannot emphasise enough how valuable Thomas’ guidance is to me for getting there and hence winning this award. I am so grateful for all his help. Importantly, this is also a direct reflection on the excellent quality in education and research provided at Imperial CPE as seen in the letter from the MRS president to the Dean of the FoNS. This might be the first time to an Imperial postgraduate in the MRS Graduate Student Awards event, but surely more are coming, especially considering how successfully the CPE members have done in the materials research field in recent years.”

by Dr Yen-Hung Lin (post-doc, Anthopoulos Group, Physics)