10/23/2014 Ashish Valentine, ECE ILLINOIS
Written by Ashish Valentine, ECE ILLINOIS
Alumnus Mark Hersam (BSEE ’96, PhD ‘00) has been named a fellow by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation: an honor sometimes referred to as the “genius grant.” [image:10827 class:fright]
The fellowship gives him $625,000 in funding with absolutely no conditions as to how the money must be spent.
“The resources provided with this grant are really no strings attached; it’s rare to have this level of freedom to pursue our research goals,” Hersam said.
Hersam, a professor and materials scientist at Northwestern University, leads a research group looking into nanomaterials and ways to make them more efficient, inexpensive, and reproducible with the end goal of accelerating the development of nanotechnology applications in our daily lives.
The nanomaterials Hersam works with can be incredibly complex, but the easiest way to understand them is to start with the unassuming, greyish-black shavings from a No. 2 pencil.
Examine the point of the pencil and you’ll see a thin stick of graphite, made up of elemental carbon. Looking at graphite at the nanoscale, we’ll see that graphite is actually made up of layers of carbon atoms stacked upon each other. If you peel off the layers one by one, all the way down until you get to one sheet literally an atom thick, you’ll come across the material known as graphene.
Graphene is a notable substance in many ways. It is the thinnest material known to humanity, composed of carbon atoms arranged into hexagons and rolled out into a sheet one atom thick. Besides this, it’s also the strongest material we know of.
As Columbia University mechanical engineering professor James Hone famously said, “It would take an elephant balanced on a pencil to break a sheet of graphene the thickness of saran wrap.” Graphene is also the best conductor of heat at room temperature and of electricity.
These properties make graphene an amazing prospect for a number of technological applications. Imagine electronics made at the molecular scale, using circuits crisscrossed by pathways an atom thick, and devices hundreds of times cheaper to manufacture because they rely not on rare earth minerals but from carbon, one of the most abundant elements on Earth.
Much of the scientific community’s attention is devoted to exploring graphene further, and Hersam’s materials science team at Northwestern University is finding ways to better manipulate and build with nanomaterials like graphene.
“We are actively working on making large populations of carbon nanomaterials homogeneous and reproducible,” Hersam said.
One way that Hersam’s team is hoping its research will pay off is in the field of energy efficiency. Their work on finding better ways to build nanostructures could result in eventually creating solar panels made from carbon. When a photon of sunlight hits a solar panel, it is converted to electricity that must conduct through the absorbing material, which currently silicon. Since carbon nanomaterials have the potential to be more conductive than silicon, carbon-based solar cells have the potential to be higher efficiency and ultimately cheaper than current technology.
With the MacArthur grant in hand, Hersam aims to take his research in bolder directions. While graphene is the current favorite material among researchers, Hersam will use his grant to explore additional compounds that could hold even more promise.
“I’m going to use the funds to explore research is higher risk than I could before,” Hersam said. “We work a lot with graphene and other carbon nanomaterials, so we look forward to branching out to the other elements in the periodic table.”
While an undergraduate at ECE ILLINOIS, Hersam’s adviser was Professor Joseph W Lyding. Lyding specializes in nanomaterials and nanoscience, and Hersam credits him with ultimately inspiring him to pursue this route. After leaving to pursue his master’s at Cambridge, an experience Hersam credits as “broadening his mind intellectually and culturally,” Hersam returned to Illinois and worked closely with Lyding on nanoscience research. Lyding was much more than just an adviser, for Hersam. Lyding was also a mentor and role model that taught him rigorous scientific practice.
“My work in the Lyding group led me to pursuing nanoscience as a career,” Hersam said. “Professor Lyding was highly influential on me as a person and as a scientist, and it was a fantastic opportunity to study under him.”
Lyding had complimentary words for Hersam, as well.
“Mark is amazingly friendly and helpful, and was always helping people in the group,” Lyding said. “As a person, he was just a lot of fun to work with, and so smart and motivated, I knew early on that he was special. I knew when working with him that he was destined for great things and he has achieved them.”