Justus Ndukaife, assistant professor of electrical engineering, spent 20 minutes describing his optical nanotweezers to a panel of five distinguished professors from the United States, Australia, and China during a live online competition鈥擱ising Stars of Light鈥攖hat has drawn 260,000 viewers worldwide.
After two sessions in which 10 finalists presented their research in a global campaign for the most talented young scientists in optics-related fields, Ndukaife claimed third place and shares it with two other professors鈥攐ne from Stanford University and one from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology-Lausanne.
鈥淚 am very pleased and honored to receive this notable global recognition highlighting our optical nanotweezer research,鈥� Ndukaife said. 鈥淚 am also honored to share the stage with the other nine finalists who are truly outstanding young researchers from around the globe聽and to share our latest research to a large global science audience.鈥�
The event was held in November and is co-organized by Nature academic journal Light: Science & Applications and by iCANX, a host of global talks on frontier research topics. The judges rated final candidates鈥� presentations on innovation, impact, and performance.
Ndukaife has developed the first-ever聽opto-thermo-electrohydrodynamic tweezers,聽聽that can trap and manipulate objects as small as proteins and viruses. The technique, developed by the professor and Chuchuan Hong and Sen Yang, two graduate students in his group, gives researchers a powerful new tool for the study and perhaps early detection of viruses, cancer, and neurodegenerative diseases.
鈥淪tand-off trapping and manipulation of sub-10 nm objects and biomolecules using opto-thermo-electrohydrodynamic tweezers鈥� was published online in the journal Nature Nanotechnology on August 31, 2020.
The event organizers received applications for the Rising Stars competition from the U.S., China, UK, Germany, Switzerland, Australia, Singapore and Denmark. The selection committee chose 10 final candidates:
- Amit Agrawal, NIST, USA,聽Second place award
- Avik Dutt, Stanford University, USA,聽Third place award
- Guangwei Hu, National University of Singapore, Singapore,聽Candidate award
- Junqiu Liu, EPFL, Switzerland,聽Third place award
- Justus Ndukaife, 杏吧原创, USA,聽Third place award
- Shulin Sun, Fudan University, China,聽Candidate award
- Shuo Sun, University of Colorado-Boulder, USA,聽Second place award
- Giulia Tagliabue, EPFL, Switzerland,聽First place award
- Sui Yang, University of California-Berkeley, USA,聽Candidate award
- Yi Yang, MIT, USA,聽Candidate award
All the award winners will each receive a monetary prize and a publication fee waiver in Light: Science & Applications.
by Brenda Ellis.