The evaluation committee, consisting of several members of the Editorial Board of the Nanomaterials, is pleased to announce the winners of the 2018 Nanomaterials Young Investigator Awards. Since the nominees were very impressive, the journal has decided to give three awards: the first-place award of 2000 CHF as originally announced, a second-place award of 800 CHF, and a third-place award to publish an accepted article in Nanomaterials free of charge within the next year. The selection process involved consideration of all the submitted materials, with special emphasis on the number and quality of the publications, their citations, and the significance and innovation of the research. We are therefore pleased to announce that the first-place winner is Dr. Deep M. Jariwala, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA. The second-place winner is Dr. Jiajia Zhou of the Institute for Biomedical Materials and Devices (IBMD), Faculty of Science, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia. The third-place winner is Dr. Edoardo Albisetti of the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA and the Department of Physics, Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy.

Dr. Jariwala’s impressive work combines novel nanomaterials, such as carbon nanotubes and 2D transition metal dichalcogenides, into heterostructures and electronic and optoelectronic devices. His work encompasses synthesis of nanomaterials, characterization of their electronic and optical properties, and then fabrication of them into devices, such as diodes, FETs, and photodetectors.

Dr. Zhou discovered that certain heat-favorable phonons, which exist at the surface of nanoparticles, can combat thermal quenching. Her patented Thermal DotTM technology can intelligently harvest heat to obtain emitted visible light from the nanoparticles, with enhanced intensity by as much as a factor of 2000. This technology has numerous applications, from photovoltaic solar cells to nanoscale temperature sensors.

Dr. Albisetti conceived and demonstrated thermally assisted magnetic scanning probe lithography (tam-SPL) for nanopatterning reconfigurable magnetic nanostructures in ferromagnetic thin films. This patented technique has applications in the design of novel nanomaterials and devices for nanomagnetism, spintronics, and magnonics. The related technique of thermochemical scanning probe lithography (tc-SPL) even allows the definition of nanoscale patterns with precisely controlled protein concentration.

Congratulations to all three of these extraordinary 2018 Nanomaterials Young Investigators!

--- Prof. Dr. Shirley Chiang, Editor-in-Chief, Nanomaterials, and the Evaluation Committee: Prof. Dr. Yuan Chen, Dr. habil. Yogendra Kumar Mishra, Prof. Dr. Jordi Sort, and Dr. Vijay Kumar Thakur.