Zhixian Zhou receives NSF award to study next-generation low-power and high-performance electronics

Dr. Zhixian Zhou has been part of the Wayne State University physics faculty since 2007. This year, Zhou was awarded $299,855 by the National Science Foundation (NSF) for his proposal, "Pin down the mechanism of Fermi-level pinning in metal/2D-semiconductor contacts" (award number: DMR- 2004445), which will fund Zhou's research for three years.

Much of that research will take place in the Zhou Lab in the Physics Building, where he works with Ph.D. candidates and undergraduate students. This award will allow Zhou to support Ph.D. students and address challenging problems in atomically thin semiconductors, referred to as two-dimensional (2D) semiconductors, which have recently emerged as potential candidate materials for next-generation low-power and high-performance electronics.

Zhou has received five major NSF grants (exceeding $2 million) to support his research in 2D materials and device physics at Wayne State, including three research grants as sole principal investigator (PI) and two Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) grants as a co-PI. Zhou's research supported by these grants has resulted in seven Ph.D. dissertations and more than 30 peer-reviewed papers, many of which were published in prestigious scientific journals such as ACS Nano (Impact Factor: 13.9), Nano Letters (IF: 12.27), and Advanced Materials (IF 25.8).