Summer 2020

Reeja Jayan was selected to receive the CMU 2020 Dean’s Early Career Fellowship in recognition for her exemplary contributions to her field. The Dean’s Early Career Fellowships are awarded to untenured faculty members who have been nominated by their department heads. They were selected to receive the fellowship after review and discussion by the College of Engineering Review Committee.

Reeja leads her multidisciplinary lab’s research in field-assisted materials growth, exploring different ways electromagnetic fields can synthesize materials previously unavailable for conventional synthesis routes. Her work has been awarded funding from the Department of Energy (DOE), Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), and private sponsors. Jayan has earned numerous young investigator awards, including the 2018 National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award, The Incline Who’s Next: Technology Award, and Pittsburgh Magazine’s 40 Under 40 Award.

Congrats Reeja!

Scientific communities rely on the international friendships and collaborations that we build and exclusion has no place here. PQI is 100% an international community based in Pittsburgh and we value and need the presence of international students and faculty. While the ICE measure impacting students has been rescinded for now, it was a drastic and serious upset to many student lives.

We've asked PQI members to pin the location of their hometown in the map below so that we can appreciate how far many of you have come to be an important part of our community. Thank you for being in Pittsburgh and part of PQI!

However, there is no "fire burn and cauldron bubble" here because PQI members don't need a magic potion to be double featured in the Nature Physics July Focus editorial highlighting emergent superconductivity. Out of the four articles in this discussion, Sergey Frolov and Jeremy Levy each contributed a perspective on the current status and trajectory of research in superconductivity.   

The perspective from Sergey and collaborators, Topological superconductivity in hybrid devices, details special features found in topological superconductors and emergent properties, such as theorized Majorana quasiparticles and phases. Unambiguously inducing and controlling Majorana phases in superconductors remains a yet to be solved challenge for researchers, but progress has been made.

Congratulations to the 2020/2021 PQI Graduate Student Research Award Winners!!

Xiaowei Bogetti (Saxena Group, Chemistry), Supriya Ghosh (Waldeck Group, Chemistry), Xun Li (Lee Group, MechE), Zehan Li (Liu Group, Physics), Aditi Nethwewala (Levy Group, Physics), and Timothy Yang (Saidi Group, MechE) each won one term of graduate funding for the year 2020/2021.