Assistant materials engineering professor earns $1.2M NSF grant for 2D materials research
Published: Feb 23, 2024 1:00 PM
By Jeremy Henderson
The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently awarded Konstantin Kylukin, assistant professor in the Department of Materials Engineering, $1.2 million through its Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer our Future (DMREF) program, which funds research into "novel materials to address grand societal challenges."
And these days, few materials are more novel — or hold more potential for addressing societal challenges — than 2D materials.
"Materials like graphene and MXenes usually serve as building blocks for many technologies, including batteries, computing devices, wearable nanoelectronics, purification membranes and sensors," Klyukin said. "The discovery of Graphene won the Nobel Prize, and the possibilities of another major discoveries like MXenes and transition-metal dichalcogenides always sparks a lot of excitement in the scientific and engineering communities."
The goal of Klyukin's project, "Computationally Driven Discovery and Synthesis of 2D Materials through Selective Etching," is to spark even more.
"I'm aiming to expand beyond the commonly studied 2D materials with weak interlayer interactions through selective electrochemical extraction of atoms from layered 3D structures," Klyukin said.
Klyukin said the project will draw upon the expertise of a multidisciplinary team of chemists, physicists and materials scientists utilizing state-of-the-art computational, experimental and machine-learning techniques in a closed-loop paradigm inspired by the Materials Genome Initiative.
Klyukin is the project's principal investigator (PI); co-PI is Majid Beidaghi, former associate professor the Department of Materials Engineering, who was on the Drexel University research team that discovered MXenes in 2011.
"I am very grateful to my mentors and senior colleagues here at Auburn who are interested in the professional development and growth of junior faculty members," Klyukin said. "This NSF funding provides an exciting opportunity for us to advance the synthesis of existing 2D materials and hopefully accelerate the discovery of novel 2D materials that can revolutionize everyday technologies."
