News

The Van der Waals Thin Film Team, co-led by Professor Xiangfeng Duan, Professor Yu Huang (Materials Science and Engineering), and Professor Jun Chen (Bioengineering), receives the RSC 2024 Materials Chemistry Horizon Prize for the development of van der Waals thin films with high electronic performance, mechanical stretchability, and permeability for highly flexible, which offer a new material platform for adaptable and breathable bioelectronic membranes.

The Materials Chemistry Horizon Prize (also known as Stephanie L. Kwolek Prize) recognizes significant recent novel discoveries or advances made in the area of materials chemistry. 

The team has developed a novel concept for van der Waals thin films (vdWTFs) made up of two-dimensional, layered sheets arranged such that adjacent sheets interact via van der Waals forces. This makes them highly stretchable, permeable (allowing liquids and gases to pass in and out), and capable of retaining high electronic performance even when stretched. These properties make them ideal for use in bioelectronic (a field which interfaces electronics with living systems) membrane applications where it is important that the film is conformal to irregular surface and breathable.

The breakthrough provides the foundation for a new generation of electronics that can seamlessly integrate with living things. Potential applications include wearable health monitoring devices, human-machine interfaces, robotic technologies, and artificial intelligence. It could also enable cellular-scale bioelectronics to accurately monitor electrophysiological signals at the organism or cell level and pave the way for synthetic electronic-cellular hybrids.

“We are honoured to receive this recognition from the Royal Society of Chemistry,” said Prof. Xiangfeng Duan. “I am grateful to the talented and dedicated team who have made this possible. We are excited to further develop and leverage our vdWTFs for various technologies, particularly wearable healthcare devices.”