Congratulations to VINSE members Zhiliang Pan, Youngji Kim, Ethan Ray and Emily Buckner, each who received awards at the 2024 MRS Spring Meeting in Seattle.
Zhiliang Pan, a first-year postdoc in Mechanical Engineering, won the 2024 MRS Spring Meeting Best Poster Award for his poster titled “Thermal Transport in Quasi-1D van der Waals Crystal Nanowires”. The poster summarized the study of thermal properties of quasi-1D van der Waals crystal nanowires in Prof. Deyu Li’s group in the past few years featuring the abnormal size effect, strong and tunable electron-phonon interactions, and superdiffusive phonon transport. Read more about this research: ACS Nano, Nano Letters, Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics, and Nature.
![MRS Spring 2024 Poster_Zhiliang](http://my.vanderbilt.edu/vinsenews/files/2024/05/MRS-Spring-2024-Poster_Zhiliang-650x488.jpg)
Youngji Kim, a first-year postdoc in Mechanical Engineering, won the “Best Poster Award for Symposium EL08 in 2024 MRS Spring Meeting” for her poster titled “Configurationally Tunable Mie, Plasmonic and Diffractive Structural Colors in a Single Design“. This poster summarized the study of strategy to configurationally tune structural colors using different optical mechanisms during her PhD in Prof. Jerome K. Hyun’s group (Ewha Womans University, South Korea). Click here to read more about this research.
![Kim with the session chairs](http://my.vanderbilt.edu/vinsenews/files/2024/05/Kim-with-the-session-chairs-650x488.jpg)
Ethan Ray, a third-year undergraduate at Georgia Institute of Technology and 2023 VINSE REU student, won a Best Poster Award for his poster “Plasmonics and Metasurfaces: Design, Materials, and Applications” Symposium for his presentation on “Manipulating Confined Infrared Light via Polaritonic Design of Sub-Diffractional alpha-MoO3 Wedges“. Ethan was also nominated for a Best Poster Award for the Thursday Poster Session.
![Ethan Ray with his poster](http://my.vanderbilt.edu/vinsenews/files/2024/05/Ethan-Ray-with-his-poster-488x650.jpg)
Emily Buckner is a mechanical engineering undergraduate at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and 2023 VINSE REU student. She worked in Dr. Dong’s lab through the REU program where she conducted research on the design, fabrication, and control of soft robots. Her poster “Wirelessly Actuated Soft Miniature Robots with Integrated Microfluidic Modules for Targeted Drug Delivery” was selected for a Poster Presenter Travel Award in the “Bio-based and Biomimetic Polymers in Soft Robotics” symposium.
![Emily Buckner 2](http://my.vanderbilt.edu/vinsenews/files/2024/05/Emily-Buckner-2.jpg)
The 2024 MRS Spring Meeting attracts over 4,000 materials science professionals from around the world. Best Poster Awards are selected by the Meeting Chairs on the basis of the poster’s technical content, appearance, graphic excellence and presentation quality.