Deji Akinwande, Texas ECE associate professor, was selected as one of five inaugural Moore Inventor Fellows. This new fellowship program recognizes early-career innovators at U.S. universities with a high potential to accelerate progress in scientific research, environmental conservation and patient care. Akinwande is creating an atomically thin 2D-silicon structure known as silicene, which could provide a tenfold increase in energy efficiency for integrated circuits such as computer chips. His goal is to make the world’s thinnest silicon transistor, which would extend the reach of Moore's Law and scale silicon technology to even smaller dimensions
For this inaugural year, the Moore Inventor Fellows competition drew from early-career researchers at Association of American Universities member institutions and 15 additional institutions from the top 50 National Institutes of Health-funded medical schools.
The fellows will be recognized at an event at The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, CA highlighting the importance of invention in Silicon Valley and beyond. The event includes panel discussions with the fellows and champions of invention from academia, government, venture capital and industry who will discuss the conditions needed to nurture invention in the United States.
Akinwande is a recipient of the 2016 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on scientists and engineers in the early stages of their independent research careers. He also received the David & Doris Lybarger Endowed Faculty Fellowship in Engineering and was a past recipient of fellowships from the Ford Foundation and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He has been awarded the inaugural IEEE Nano Geim and Novoselov Graphene Prize, the NSF CAREER award, the Army and DTRA Young Investigator awards, and the 3M Nontenured Faculty Award. His work on flexible graphene systems was selected as among the "best of 2012" by the nanotechweb online technology news portal and has been featured on MIT's technology review.
