Biography

Prof. van der Zande runs an interdisciplinary research group at the nexus of nanotechnology, mechanics, and material physics. He is a team lead on the Illinois Material Research Science and Engineering Center and was recently awarded the 2022 Society of Engineering Science Young Investigator Medal, the NSF CAREER award, and is on the Clarivate Analytics list of the world’s most influential researchers in 2018-2022. He is an Associate Editor for the Journal ACS Nano Letters. He earned a Ph.D. in Physics from Cornell University in 2011 and a B.S in Physics and Mathematics from University of California, Santa Cruz in 2003. He then became a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Energy Frontier Research Center at Columbia University. He has published 78+ articles with >25,000 citations in journals including Nature, Science, Nature Materials, Advanced Materials, and Nano Letters.

Research

The overarching focus of our research is on leveraging nanomaterials as nanoscale building blocks to engineer new classes of devices to address grand challenges in health, energy and information. To this end, research efforts have centered on two-dimensional (2D) materials – materials which are stable as monolayers one or a few atoms thick, representing the ultimate limit in thickness for both molecular electronics and mechanical atomic membranes. Our work spans discovering new synthesis and atomically precise fabrication techniques for manufacturing devices from nanomaterials, understanding the atomic-to-device scale origins of the unique mechanical, chemical, electronic, and quantum properties of nanomaterials, and exploring how to leverage these properties for specific applications such as next generation semiconductor electronics, quantum technologies, biosensors, reconfigurable nanoelectromechanical systems, and wearable electronics.

Education

  • 2003 · 2011
    Cornell University
    PhD in Physics

Positions

  • 2015 · Present
    Assistant Professor (Mechanical Science and Engineering)
    University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Publications

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