Talapin Lab News

Ahhyun Jeong has been awarded the Danute Nitecki Fellowship for excellence in research! The Fellowship will support her work in the exciting field of nanocrystal superlattices during the 2024-2025 academic year.

Congratulations to Dr. Haoqi Wu! He has successfully defended his thesis “Direct Optical and Thermal Lithography of Inorganic Nanomaterials for Optics and Optoelectronics.” See examples of his work here and here.

Our first-year graduate student Noah Mason has been awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. This prestigious award provides full financial support for three years. We are very excited to see what Noah will be doing in the field of MXenes!

Di Wang has been named an American Chemical Society Division of Inorganic Chemistry Young Investigator! He will present his exciting new results in the science of MXenes during the ACS Young Investigator Symposium at the ACS Fall 2024 National Meeting.

Dmitri Talapin is leading the National Science Foundation’s new Phase I Center for Chemical Innovation, MXenes Synthesis, Tunability, and Reactivity Center for Chemical Innovation (M-STAR). MXenes are an exciting new class of materials with great potential in electromagnetic shielding, catalysis and energy storage. They have also been predicted to have many properties more exciting to chemists and physicists. The field of MXenes, including our center, has just been profiled in Chemical & Engineering News. Read about it here!

Isak Jatoi, Noah Mason, Tanya Chen, and Yi-Chun Liu have joined our group as graduate students!

Congratulations to Dr. Aritrajit Gupta! He has successfully defended his thesis “Alloyed III-V Nanocrystals as Viable Emitters for Display Applications.”

Luca Giordano has joined our group as a visiting graduate student! He will be studying with our group from September to December as part of his doctoral work under Prof. Dr. Zeger Hens at Ghent University in Belgium.

Di Wang has been awarded the William Rainey Harper Dissertation Fellowship by the Division of Physical Sciences for his research in the 2023-2024 academic year. This prestigious award recognizes the great promise of Di’s work in the exploding field of MXene materials chemistry. See some of his recent work here and here.

Youssef Tazoui has joined our group as an undergraduate student!

Congratulations to Dr. Wooje Cho! He has successfully defended his thesis “Synthesis of Colloidal Semiconductor Nanocrystals in Unconventional Circumstances: Heterogeneous Mixtures and High-Pressure Reactors.”

Di Wang’s artistic composition “Origami in a tube,” depicting flowerlike spheres of Ti₂CCl₂, has won him the Grand Prize in UChicago’s 2023 Science as Art contest! Congratulations!

See more of Di’s work in our recent cover article in Science.

Our article “Direct synthesis and chemical vapor deposition of 2D carbide and nitride MXenes” has been published in the March 23 issue of Science magazine as the cover article!

For more on our work on the fascinating MXene class of materials, see also our works “Colloidal gelation in liquid metals enables functional nanocomposites of 2D metal carbides (MXenes) and lightweight metals” and “Covalent surface modifications and superconductivity of two-dimensional metal carbide MXenes.”

Congratulations to Dr. Josh Portner! He has successfully defended his thesis “Electrostatic Stabilization and Self-Assembly of Charged Nanocrystals.”

Young-Hwan Kim has joined our group as a graduate student!

Dr. James Cassidy has joined our group as postdoctoral research associate! He brings many exciting developments in nanomaterials synthesis from his work with Mikhail Zamkov at Bowling Green State University.

We have won the award for energy savings in the quarterly campaign to Shut the Sash across the Gordon Center for Integrative Sciences and Searle Chemistry Laboratory! Remember to keep your fume hoods closed whenever you are not setting up or modifying an experiment.

You too can stay safe and do great science with less energy—learn more at the Office of Sustainability.

Dr. Justin Ondry’s presentation, “Development of Molten Salt Solvents for Synthesis of Ternary and Quaternary III-V Colloidal Nanocrystals via Cation Exchange,” has been recognized as one of the most outstanding posters at the Gordon Research Conference on Colloidal Semiconductor Nanocrystals. This meeting represents the bleeding edge of the nanocrystal chemistry community’s work.

Expect many exciting developments in the literature from Justin’s work in the coming months!

Zirui Zhou has been awarded the Julia S. and Edward C. Lee Memorial Fellowship by the Department of Chemistry for his research in the 2022-2023 academic year. He will be studying the structure of III-V semiconductor colloidal nanocrystals and their photoconductivity in active device layers.

Alex Hinkle has been awarded the Department of Chemistry’s Frances E. Knock Prize for Outstanding Academic Achievement in Chemistry. See Alex’s work here!

Igor Coropceanu was interviewed about our recent work (I. Coropceanu et al. Science 2022, 375, 1422) by the Electronic Engineering journal.  The podcast episode is here.

Alex Hinkle is the 2022 recipient of the Undergraduate Physical Chemistry Award by the ACS Physical Chemistry Division for the UChicago Chemistry Department. See Alex’s work here!

Welcome new scientific editor and lab administrator, Andrew Nelson!

Congratulations to Dr. Jia-Ahn Pan on his new position at the Molecular Foundry!

Congratulations to Dr. Jia-Ahn Pan! He successfully defended his thesis, “Direct Optical Lithography of Colloidal Inorganic Nanomaterials for Photonic and Optoelectronic Applications”.

Congratulations to Dr. Igor Coropceanu on his new position at Nanosys!

Congratulations to Prof. Himchan Cho on his new position as Assistant Professor at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology!

Our work on “Direct Optical Patterning of Quantum Dot Light‐Emitting Diodes via In Situ Ligand Exchange” is out, and is a frontispiece feature!

UChicago News article about our MXenes work published in Science is out. “UChicago chemists invent way to customize compounds just a few atoms thick”

Congratulations to Dr. Vlad Kamysbayev on his new position at Intel.

Congratulations to Dr. Maggie Hudson on her new postdoc position with the Castellano lab at North Carolina State University.

Congratulations to Vlad Kamysbayev! He was awarded our Department’s Elizabeth R. Norton Prize for Excellence in Research in Chemistry.

Congratulations to Dr. Vlad Kamysbayev! He successfully defended his PhD thesis, “Atomic Engineering of Nanomaterials in Molten Salts and Liquid Metals”.

Congratulations to Nivedina Sarma who presented her undergraduate thesis on “Developing Nanoparticle Self-Assembly to Make Scalable 3D Materials” at the Spring 2020 Undergraduate Honors Thesis Symposium.

Congratulations to undergrad Nivedina Sarma on her NSF Graduate Research Fellowship!

Welcome new graduate student, Di Wang!

Congratulations to Prof. Yuanyuan Wang on his new position at Nanjing University.

Welcome Dr. Chenkun Zhou, a new postdoc in the lab!

Congratulations to Dr. Maggie Hudson! She successfully defended her PhD thesis, “Design, Control, and Characterization of Solution-Processed Semiconductors for Optoelectronic Applications”.

Welcome new visiting graduate student, Min Chen!

Congratulations to Dr. Eric Janke on his new position at Cree Inc.

Congratulations to Dr. Eric Janke! He successfully defended his PhD thesis, “Role of Disorder in III-V Nanocrystal Emitters and Self Assembly of Charge Stabilized Colloids”.

Congratulations to Prof. Xinzheng Lan on his new position at Huazhong University of Science and Technology.

Congratulations to undergrad Nivedina Sarma for being named a Beckman Scholar!

Congratulations to graduate student Vlad Kamysbayev on a Chemistry Department Fellowship.

Congratulations to graduate student Josh Portner on the Joan Shiu Chemistry Department Student Service Award.

Vladislav Kamysbayev gave a talk at the 2019 Materials Research Society Meeting in Phoenix, AZ. He discussed “Novel functional nanocomposites of 2D MXenes and light-weight metals”.

Congratulations to Eleanor Dunietz who presented her undergraduate thesis on “Synthesis of III-V Semiconductor Nanomaterials” at the Spring 2019 Undergraduate Honors Thesis Symposium.