Zhu selected for IBM Faculty Award

ECE ILLINOIS Associate Professor Wenjuan Zhu was recently selected for an IBM Faculty award for her project "Nanoscale Ferroelectric Devices for Cognitive Computing." Zhu joined the Illinois faculty in 2014. Prior, she was a research staff member at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center and an advisory engineer/scientist at the IBM Semiconductor Research and Development Center (SRDC). She earned her master's and PhD in electrical engineering from Yale University in 1999 and 2003, respectively.

The IBM Faculty Awards are designed "to foster collaboration between researchers at leading universities worldwide and those in IBM research, development and servicse organizations and promote courseware and curriculum innovation to stimulate growth in disciplines and geographies that are strategic to IBM," according to their website.

Last year, Zhu received an NSF CAREER Award for her research, "Transforming Electronic Devices Using Two-dimensional Materials and Ferroelectric Metal Oxides." Through this study, Zhu sought to establish fundamental knowledge of a new hybrid material platform that consisted of novel ferroelectric metal oxides, stacked with a layer of two-dimensional material like graphene and mono/di-chalcogenides. This was the first systematic study of 2D materials on the newly discovered ferroelectric hafnium and zirconium oxides, which have excellent scalability, higher coercive field, and full compatiblity with industry standard CMOS technology in comparison to traditional perovskite materials. Zhu is also affiliated with the MNTL and the Beckman Institute.