Wenhao Sun receives awards for Best Talk and Best Poster at MRS Fall 2018
Wenhao Sun, a post-doc from our group, received awards for both Best Talk and Best Poster at the MRS Fall 2018 Meeting. He received a Best Talk award for his talk, “Nucleation of Metastable Vaterite CaCO3 is Mediated by Electric Fields“, in which he explains how the Vaterite phase of CaCO3 is not actually stabilized by surface energy but can be stabilized by electric fields. The role of electric fields in nucleating the polar polymorph of CaCO3 can be more generally leveraged to synthesize metastable polar phases of other materials, potentially opening the door to materials with novel or superior functionality.
(Image from: https://materials.typepad.com/mrs_meeting_scene/posters/)
He also received a Best Poster award for his poster, “A Map of the Inorganic Ternary Metal Nitrides“, in which he shows the construction of a large stability map of the inorganic ternary metal nitrides. The map, which clusters the ternary nitrides into chemical families with distinct stability and metastability and highlights hundreds of promising new ternary nitride spaces for experimental investigation, was then used to guide the synthesis of 7 novel Zn- and Mg-based ternary nitrides. Find more information on the arxiv publication here: A Map of the Inorganic Ternary Metal Nitrides and the full poster here.
