Sunny Gupta, a third-year graduate student in Yakobson’s Group, has been awarded the Nettie S. Autrey Fellowship for 2019–2020. This award is given to one Rice graduate student in either the School of Natural Sciences or the School of Engineering who has demonstrated outstanding achievement and promise, and pays a stipend over the coming academic year.

Sunny’s research focuses on designing novel two-dimensional quantum materials for next-generation electronics. Using first-principles quantum theory methods and high-performance computing, he is tackling some of the challenging problems related to fundamental physics and materials realization for optoelectronics, spintronics, and quantum computing. All three areas constitute a current topic of intense research leading to next-generation electronics and are highly required to go beyond Moore’s law and to make faster, secure, and more power efficient computing devices.