Mario Wriedt, associate professor of chemistry & biomolecular science, and Zijie Yan, assistant professor of chemical & biomolecular engineering, in Clarkson University’s School of Arts & Sciences and Wallace H. Coulter School of Engineering, respectively, were awarded the John W. Graham Jr. Faculty Research Award during the University’s spring 2019 commencement ceremony today.
The $1,500 research account is presented to “faculty members who have shown promise in engineering, business, liberal arts or scientific research.”
Mario Wriedt’s research expertise is on the design and structure-property relationships of new functional solid-state materials for energy applications. He has received several awards and fellowships including the American Chemical Association’s PRF DNI award and the National Science Foundation’s CAREER award for his work on the design of a new class of advanced porous materials for energy applications, and has authored more than 75 research papers that have been published in peer-reviewed international journals. He is also co-holder of a patent.
Wriedt is a member of the American Crystallographic Association and the American Chemical Society.
Five doctoral students and ten undergraduate students conduct research in Wriedt’s Functional Materials Design & X-ray Diffraction Laboratory. As representative examples, his work has been featured on the covers of the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Dalton Transaction, and CrystEngComm, and disseminated as an invited speaker at a Gordon Research Conference.
Wriedt received his master’s and doctoral degrees in chemistry from the Christian-Albrechts-University (CAU) in Kiel, Germany. Before coming to Clarkson, he was a visiting postdoctoral scholar and research associate at Texas A&M University. Prior to that, he performed research at CAU.
Zijie Yan’s research involves optical trapping and manipulation of nanostructures, laser beam shaping, and electrodynamics simulations. In particular, he is an expert on laser-induced self-assembly of nanoparticles, which leads to a special type of materials called optical matter.
Yan has been publishing papers regularly in leading journals of nanoscience while working at Clarkson, including Nano Letters, Advanced Materials, Angewandte Chemie, and Nature Communications. He has also reviewed manuscripts for those journals and proposals for the NSF. His research is mainly supported by the National Science Foundation; and the W. M. Keck Foundation, from which he received a $1 million research grant in 2016 with two collaborators. His research is also supported by the NSF Industry–University Cooperative Research Center Clarkson University Site: Center for Metamaterials, for which he currently serves as the site director. Yan is a member of Clarkson’s Million Dollar Club, and belongs to a winning team for the first Ignite Research Fellowship competition at Clarkson.
Before joining Clarkson in 2015, Yan was a postdoctoral scholar in the James Franck Institute at the University of Chicago. He received dual bachelor of science degrees in materials science & engineering and computer science, and a master of science in physical electronics from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China. He received his Ph.D. in materials engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
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