Six RPI students have been awarded fellowships from the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP).

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Esther Wertz, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Physics, Applied Physics, and Astronomy, has been appointed Rensselaer’s faculty fellow of UPWARDS for the Future. UPWARDS stands for the U.S.-Japan University Partnership for Workforce Advancement and Research & Development in Semiconductors. It was established in May 2023 by Micron and Tokyo Electron Limited to “to bring together 11 universities from across the U.S. and Japan to develop leading semiconductor curricula, creating opportunities for cross-collaboration.”

Jian Shi, Ph.D., associate professor in both the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the Department of Physics, Applied Physics, and Astronomy at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), has been selected for the Simons Foundation's Pivot Fellowship. 

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Jian Shi, Ph.D., associate professor of materials science and engineering, as well as physics, applied physics, and astronomy, has won the prestigious 2023 IEEE Ferroelectrics Young Investigator Award. The award recognizes “the important contributions of young scientists/engineers in reference to their contributions to fundamental research, integration, application, or education.” Recognizing only one or two exceptional scientists in the relevant field each year, this highly competitive award serves as a prestigious accolade for independent scholars under or at the age of 40.

A team of researchers led by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Trevor David Rhone, assistant professor in the Department of Physics, Applied Physics, and Astronomy, has identified novel van der Waals (vdW) magnets using cutting-edge tools in artificial intelligence (AI). In particular, the team identified transition metal halide vdW materials with large magnetic moments that are predicted to be chemically stable using semi-supervised learning. These two-dimensional (2D) vdW magnets have potential applications in data storage, spintronics, and even quantum computing.

Humberto Terrones, Rayleigh Endowed Chair Professor in Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Department of Physics, Applied Physics, and Astronomy, is as passionate about community outreach as he is about science.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Moussa N’Gom, assistant professor of physics, applied physics, and astronomy, has devised a method to make communications between satellites and the ground more effective no matter the weather. In research recently published, N’Gom and his team used ultrafast, femtosecond lasers to cut through the clouds and rain that commonly cause losses in free-space optical communication (FSO).