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MSE News and Events

Wei Bao, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has won the Early Career Program (ECP) Award and Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP) Award from the Department of Defense to study superconductors and cavity quantum materials, respectively.
The paper titled “On the nature of thermal transport in organic/inorganic nanolaminates” by Rajan Khadka and Prof. Pawel Keblinski has been featured as a cover article in the Journal of Applied Physics. Independently, the same work, as well as Rajan Khadka, were recognized by the MSE department by the 2024 “Norman S. Stoloff Research Excellence Award.
The MSE department welcomes new new Assistant Professor, Dr. Wei Bao, who will build a research group in the broad area of quantum materials for quantum information and quantum computing applications.
Prof. Jian Shi has won the prestigious 2023 IEEE Ferroelectrics Young Investigator Award “for his exciting out-of-box work on ferroelectrics and new way exploration of old materials." This highly-competitive award recognizes only one or two exceptional scientists under the age of 40 in the relevant field each year.
Dr. Hull has been appointed as Vice President for Research after serving as Acting Vice President for Research since March 2020. He also continues to serve as director of the Rensselaer Center for Materials, Devices, and Integrated Systems (cMDIS).

Institute News

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) has received a $10 million gift from Ajit Prabhu ’98, founder and CEO of Quest Global, to establish the Ajit Prabhu Catalyst Endowment and the Ajit Prabhu Catalyst Fund, both in support of the Office of Strategic Alliances and Translation (OSAT). Prabhu launched the fund, which will assist RPI student and faculty entrepreneurs.
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) is proud to announce that Pingkun Yan, Ph.D., associate professor of Biomedical Engineering at RPI, has been appointed chair of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS) Technical Committee on Biomedical Imaging and Image Processing (BIIP).
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Georges Belfort, Ph.D., and Steven Cramer, Ph.D., both Institute Professors of Chemical and Biological Engineering, have won the 2025 Bernard M. Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education given by the National Academy of Engineering. 
Lung cancer is one of the most challenging diseases, making early diagnosis crucial for effective treatment. Fortunately, advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) are transforming lung cancer screening, improving both accuracy and efficiency.
Ge Wang, the Clark-Crossan Chaired Professor and director of the Biomedical Imaging Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), has been appointed as the editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging journal. With nearly 3,000 submissions per year, it is the flagship journal in the tomographic medical imaging field and among the most highly cited of all biomedical engineering journals. Wang’s initial term is for three years and is renewable for a second term.