ECE researchers shine at Materials Research Society meeting

UW–Madison Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) students, alumnus, postdoctoral researcher, and faculty from UW–Madison earned major recognition at the recent Materials Research Society (MRS) meeting, highlighting the department’s strength in materials, photonics, and energy research.

• Minjeong Kim, an ECE Ph.D. candidate, received a highly competitive MRS Graduate Student Gold Award for her work on a method to significantly improve light extraction from nitrogen vacancy centers in diamond-based light sources. Only 11 Gold Awards were given across the entire conference, which hosts in excess of 6,000 attendees.
  
• Tanuj Kumar, an ECE Ph.D. candidate, earned one of six Best Poster Awards at the symposium level, selected from 35 posters. His poster, Silicon Nitride in Laser Sails and Thermophotovoltaics: Can Temperature Effects Be Ignored?, examined how high temperatures affect the optical behavior of silicon nitride, with applications to light sails and thermophotovoltaics, an active area of research within the department.
  
• ECE alumnus Chenghao Wan, Ph.D. ’21, won one of six Best Poster Awards among all posters presented on the conference’s third day, out of what was likely several hundred posters. His award-winning poster, Inductively Heated Metamaterial Chemical Reactors, recognized his work on high-temperature chemical processes powered by electromagnetic heating conducted at Stanford University. Wan also presented a talk and a poster on his earlier UW–Madison research on tunable VO₂ photonics from Mikhail Kats’ group.
  
• Yeonghoon Jin, an ECE postdoctoral researcher, delivered a talk on an improved atmospheric model showing that researchers in passive thermal radiative cooling often underestimate the true cooling power of their designs.
  
• ECE Professor Mikhail Kats gave an invited talk on the group’s work on passively upconverting infrared light into visible light without energy input, an approach that could ultimately enable improved human night vision.

Together, these honors and invited talks underscore the depth and impact of UW–Madison ECE’s research community, from graduate students and postdoctoral researchers to alumni and faculty, highlighting the department’s leadership and insight in advancing optical materials research.