Hongyou Fan, Sandia National Laboratories and The University of New Mexico, will receive the Mid-Career Researcher Award “for outstanding contributions in nanoparticle self-assembly of functional nanomaterials and for leadership within the Materials community.” The award recognizes exceptional achievements in materials research by mid-career professionals. The recipient must also demonstrate notable leadership in the materials area.

Fan is widely recognized for his pioneering work on stress-induced nanoscale assembly and fabrication technology. Stress-induced assembly uses mechanical forces to induce nanoparticles’ mesophase transition for fabrication of a variety of new nanostructured metallic, semiconducting, and magnetic materials. While current nanoparticle materials synthesis methods are largely based on solution chemistry at ambient conditions, the stress-induced assembly method uses mechanical compression stresses to provide an additional processing parameter to change material structures. This enables formation of new nanomaterial configurations that impart innovative chemical and physical properties that have not been possible using chemical synthesis methods.

Recently, Fan led a major effort to extend this technology using dynamically applied electromagnetic forces to achieve high throughput fabrication with loading conditions similar to embossing and imprinting manufacturing processes but at ultrashort (nanosecond) time scales. The advantage of this approach is that nanostructured materials can be fabricated with improved performance and reduced manufacturing cost. His team fabricated arrays of high-performance nanowire stress sensors exhibiting 10 times the density, twice the strength, and a much faster response time of ∼400 nanoseconds compared to those fabricated by chemical methods.

Fan is a distinguished member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories and is a National Laboratory Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at The University of New Mexico. He received a BS degree in chemistry from Jilin University in 1990, an MS degree in polymer science from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1995, and a PhD degree in chemical engineering from The University of New Mexico in 2000. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, N.M., before working there full-time. His research focuses on functional nanomaterials synthesis, assembly, and integration for nanoelectronic and nanophotonic applications. He is a Fellow of MRS and the American Physical Society. He has received the MRS Kavli Distinguished Lectureship Award in Nanoscience, four R&D 100 Awards for the development of technically significant products, The University of New Mexico Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award, and the Asian American Engineer of the Year Award.