Category Archives: awards

Nicholas Tjahjono wins the Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award

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Nicholas Tjahjono, a fourth-year doctoral student in our group and a NASA Space Technology Graduate Research Opportunities Fellow has been awarded the Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award of the Rice’s MSNE Department.

Tjahjono’s research aims to aid in NASA’s Artemis mission to the moon and beyond. His objective is to develop mechanically robust and self-healing materials capable of operating under, and protecting astronauts from, extreme space environments such as extreme heat and cold, bombardment from micrometeoroids and orbital debris, and galactic cosmic radiation.

Nicholas Tjahjono awarded NASA space tech research fellowship

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Rice PhD student aims to aid in NASA’s Artemis mission to the moon and beyond

Nicholas Tjahjono, a first-year doctoral student in Yakobson Research Group,  has been awarded the NASA Space Technology Graduate Research Opportunities Fellowship.

His research proposal, “Virtual Prototyping of Multifunctional Boron-Nitrogen Nanostructures and their Composites for Extreme Space Environments,” aims to aid in NASA’s Artemis mission to the moon and beyond.

The goal of Artemis is to land two astronauts on the moon by 2024 and explore the feasibility of establishing sustainable colonies, in preparation for sending the first astronauts to Mars by 2030. Tjahjono’s objective is to develop materials capable of operating under, and protecting astronauts from, extreme space environments such as extreme heat and cold, variable gravity, abrasive lunar dust, galactic cosmic radiation and solar particle events.

Nicholas earned his B.S. in the joint major of bioengineering and materials science and engineering, and his B.A. in music, from the University of California at Berkeley in 2018. Before coming to Rice, he worked as a research assistant in the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Molecular Foundry in Berkeley, Calif.

Sunny Gupta wins Best Oral Presentation Award

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Sunny Gupta, a fourth-year graduate student in Yakobson’s Group, has received a “Best Oral Presentation” Award at the 6th Annual SCI Summer Research Colloquium.

The nine judges who have listened in to all the talks were very impressed by the overall level of the presentations. They have recognized the outstanding quality of Sunny’s talk, and have assigned you one of the four SCI Bronze Oral Presentation Awards.

Sunny’s presentation covered his recent work on heterobilayers of 2D materials as a platform for excitonic superfluidity. After screening hundreds of 2D materials, a number of candidates were identified where spontaneous excitonic condensation mediated by purely electronic interaction should occur, and hetero-pairs Sb2Te2Se/BiTeCl, Hf2N2I2/Zr2N2Cl2, and LiAlTe2/BiTeI emerge promising. The predicted materials can be used to access different parts of electron-hole phase diagram, including BEC-BCS crossover, enabling tantalizing applications in superfluid transport, Josephson-like tunneling, and dissipationless charge counterflow.

– See more at Rice News