Haonan Ling, MAE PhD’24, Awarded The Dimitris Chorafas Foundation Prize
The Dimitris N. Chorafas Foundation awards scientific prizes for outstanding work in selected fields in the engineering sciences, medicine and the natural sciences. It rewards research characterized by its high potential for practical application and by the special significance attached to its aftermath. About 30 recent PhD graduates across select universities around the world receive the award each year.
Haonan has defended his PhD in 2024 working in Professor Artur Davoyan’s group at the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department. His PhD work focuses on light interaction with nanostructured van der Waals materials. In particular, in his works he studied waveguides made of molybdenum disulfide and thermal emitters made of boron nitride. He has shown that a combination of emergent material properties and nanostructure design can be used to create new ultracompact devices. During his PhD he has published 4 first-author papers in high impact journals, such as Nano Letters and Optica, and contributed to Nature Photonics, Nature Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials. Outside of research, Haonan has served as a teaching assistant for a wide range of MAE classes and mentored undergraduate students.
In 2023 Haonan received UCLA Dissertation Year Fellowship. Starting January 2025 he will join the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department at the University of Central Florida.