Dr. Yue Wu of Iowa State University’s Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering (CBE) has been named the recipient of the 2016 American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) Nanoscale Science & Engineering Forum (NSEF) Young Investigator Award.
The prestigious honor recognizes outstanding interdisciplinary research in nanoscience and nanotechnology by engineers or scientists in the early stages of their professional careers. It will be officially presented at the AIChE Annual Meeting in San Francisco in November. Wu will also present an award lecture in the meeting’s NSEF Plenary Session: Chemical Engineering Principles for Nanotechnology.
Wu, who is the department’s Herbert L Stiles Associate Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering, works primarily in the arena of novel thermoelectric materials, and has published more than 22 papers in the area. He has more than 57 total publications to his credit, many in high-impact journals. His personal H-index is 27 with total citations over 8,300 times. He was named a “Rising Star” by the Council of Chemical Research in 2015 and was selected by the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Journal of Materials Chemistry A as one of the “2014 Emerging Investigators.”
After receiving his undergraduate education in China, Dr. Wu obtained his Ph.D. from Harvard University and received a Miller Fellowship for postdoctoral work at the University of California, Berkeley. He began his independent research career at the School of Chemical Engineering at Purdue University in 2009 and was promoted early to a tenured associate professor position. He then joined the ISU chemical and biological engineering faculty in 2014.
Wu’s group addresses the challenges in broadly-defined bulk nanostructured composite materials, with a particular interest in the exploration of new applications of novel nanomaterials towards the highly-efficient harvest, storage, manipulation, and conversion of thermal energy. His current research is well supported by Department of Defense funding agencies, including one project from Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and two projects from Office of Naval Research.