Professor Zhixian Zhou for receives Career Development Chair Award

Career Development Chairs are awarded to as many as seven recently tenured faculty as part of the university's program to support the teaching and research endeavors of faculty members in the developmental stages of their scholarly careers. Since 1982, 231 university faculty members have held career development chairs.

The Career Development Chairs were established by generous grants to the Wayne State Fund and provide recipients financial support, encouragement and recognition at a critical time in their careers.

About Zhixian Zhou

Professor Zhixian Zhou is a leading scholar of device physics and quantum transport in two-dimensional electronics. He has more than 30 peer-reviewed publications and has raised more than $1 million to support his research. His current work seeks to address a major bottleneck in building new electrical devices with novel properties such as flexibility. Specifically, there are no two-dimensional materials that have an intrinsic gap between bound electrons and the conduction band - the property that allows such materials to be used as electrical "switches."

Zhou's research explores a class of materials called layered transition metal dichalo-genides (TMDs). He intends to build a basic electronic device - a field-effect transistor - and understand the basic quantum physics of these and similar two-dimensional materials. The Career Development Chair will allow Zhou to work more closely with staff at national facilities at the Center for Nano Materials, Oak Ridge National Lab, and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory to study and characterize two-dimensional materials and the devices fabricated with them.