Deji Akinwande, associate professor at Texas ECE, has been elected a 2017 Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS). Prof Akinwande is being recognized for “contributions to the physical study and development of scalable uniform monolayer graphene synthesis on wafer scale substrates, and the realization of gigahertz flexible and wearable two-dimensional devices, circuits and systems.”
The American Physical Society awards the annual fellowships to scientists nominated and elected by the members of the society as a recognition of the fellow's work in physics, physics education, or leadership in physics. APS elects a cohort of select members, comprising less than 1 percent of the 50,000 members, to be fellows every year. Each fellow is nominated by a certain group of the members in the APS specializing in the area of physics which the nominee specialized in. The criterion for election is “exceptional contributions to the physics enterprise; e.g., outstanding physics research, important applications of physics, leadership in or service to physics, or significant contributions to physics education. Fellowship is a distinct honor signifying recognition by one's professional peers.”
Deji Akinwande is an Associate Professor and holds the David and Doris Lybarger Endowed Faculty Fellowship in Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The current focus of his research explores materials and electronic systems based on 2D atomic layers. He is a co-inventor of a high-frequency chip-to-chip interconnect and an electrically small antenna for bio-electronics. In 2017, Prof. Akinwande was selected as one of five inaugural Moore Inventor Fellows, and was awarded the Friedrich Bessel Research Award. In 2016, he was selected to receive a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) by President Obama. His work on creating the first silicene transistor was named one of the Top 100 Science Stories of 2015 by Discover magazine. In the past, he has also been honored with the IEEE Nanotechnology Early Career Award (2015), the inaugural IEEE Nano Geim and Novoselov Graphene Prize (2012), a DTRA Young Investigator award (2012), the NSF CAREER award (2012), and the Army Research office Young Investigator Award (2011). He is one of the directors of the NASCENT ERC center at UT Austin.
