Yongjie Hu, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, has received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation, the agency’s highest honor for faculty members at the start of their research and teaching careers.
The five-year grant will support Hu’s research into discovering new thermal materials, finding their optimum growth conditions, investigating their structure and thermal properties, and understanding how the heat transfers through a spectra of phonons, which are quantum units of vibrational energy, similar to how a photon is a unit of light.
This is the third major early career award for Hu, who joined UCLA in November 2014. He recently received the Young Investigator Award from U.S. Air Force and the New Investigator Award from the American Chemical Society.
Hu’s research group, H-Lab, is focused on understanding and engineering nanoscale transport phenomena and advanced materials. His group is also developing sensors and metamaterials based on novel 2D nanomaterials for applications in electronics, energy, biomedicine, and robotics.