Dr. Micah Green Receives $400,000 NSF CAREER Award for His Work on Graphene

                 

Dr. Micah Green, an assistant professor of chemical engineering, has received a $400,000 Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation for his proposal, "CAREER: Structure-property-processing Relations for Aggregation-resistant Graphene."

The CAREER Award is one of the most prestigious grants from the National Science Foundation, given to qualified professors early in their careers to promote high-quality research and novel educational initiatives. Dr. Micah Green is the fifth current faculty member in the Department of Chemical Engineering to receive this award, following in the footsteps of Drs. Hoo, Vanapalli, Vaughn, and Weeks.

Green's award focuses on single-atom-thick sheets of graphite, termed graphene. These sheets display extraordinary mechanical strength and electrical conductivity, and have a wide range of applications ranging from solar cells to aerospace composites. In recent years, Green's group has developed a variety of techniques to produce graphene sheets without damaging them.

The work funded by the CAREER Award focuses on scalable production of these sheets and the ability to understand their surface properties as a function of processing techniques.

Education and outreach are also a major component of this award. Green will expand his successful "Science and Science Fiction" flex course at New Deal High School while initiating new efforts to educate undergraduate students about graduate research in engineering.

Green is an alumnus of the Texas Tech Department of Chemical Engineering. He earned a Ph.D. in chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, after which he served as an Attwell-Welch Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Rice University. He returned to Texas Tech as an assistant professor in 2009.