Chengdu was the host city for the National Public Entrepreneurship Innovation Week from October 9 to 15. The afternoon of October 11th saw the announcement of the First "Creative Technologies" Disruptive Innovation List jointly. This national list was sponsored by 13 enterprises and institutions including Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu, and Xinhuanet.

Associate Professor Liang Yongye is deeply focused on his work in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. For the recent award of the 2018 Junior Faculty conferred by Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech), Liang Yongye said that this is an affirmation and encouragement for his work and will inspire him to do better research and teaching in the future.

SUSTech’s Teachers’ Day Awards Ceremony were held in the Runyang Gymnasium on September 10. Numerous awards were handed out to outstanding instructors, mentors, and administrators from across SUSTech.

Prof. Cheng Chun is an associate professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. In September, he won the 2018 Outstanding Teaching Award from SUSTech. Guangdong Province awarded him the title of “Outstanding Teacher of Guangdong” at the 2018 Teachers’ Day and Outstanding Teacher Recognition Conference. These two honors make Prof. Cheng Chun feel affirmed and encouraged at the same time. "It takes a long time to train and cultivate top-notch innovative talents. I have been on the road and will continue to travel along it."

SUSTech Chemistry researchers have published 630 ESI papers which have been cited 7,687 times (12.20 times per article on average). Similarly, its counterparts in the Material Sciences have published 465 ESI papers that have been cited 5,302 times (11.40 times per article on average). Moreover, the Category Normalized Citation Impact of SUSTech’s chemistry and materials sciences majors are 1.93 and 1.97 respectively, meaning the quality of these academic papers are near twice the world average.

SUSTech Chair Professor Wang Xianglin from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering worked with American Chemical Society Publication Editor-in-Chief Kirk Schanze to co-host a forum on the topic of “Nano-, Meso-, and Microstructure Materials in Energy, Electronics and Biotechnology.” Dean of the College of Engineering Xu Zhenghe opened the forum with a passionate speech.

In March 2018, Class of 2018 undergraduate student Ouyang Wenkai received Ph.D. offers from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), University of Southern California (USC), and Technical University of Denmark (DTU). Having considered the strength of each university, Ouyang chose to pursue his studies at the Department of Materials at UCSB, ranked the fourth best materials graduate program in the world and the best in the U.S. by the National Research Council.

Micro- and nanotechnology refers to the technology related to structures and devices with a characteristic scale on the micrometer or nanometer level, which is invisible to naked eyes. It is everywhere in modern frontier science and technology as shown in Figure 1. A mobile phone that we use in our daily life is a great example of micro- and nanotechnologies. Micro- and nanotechnology enables the production and manufacturing of key components of cell phones, such as LCD or OLED displays, flash memories, micro electro-mechanical sensors (MEMS), and high-density printed circuit boards (PCB).

Recently, SUSTech Associate Professor Guo Xugang’s group from the Department of Material Sciences and Engineering published their latest research results on all-polymer solar cells (All-PSCs) in Angewandte Chemie International Edition, a top international journal in the field of chemistry (IF=11.994). Titled “Effects of Bithiophene Imide Fusion on the Device Performance of Organic Thin-Film Transistors and All-Polymer Solar Cells”, this work focuses on the design of novel polymer acceptor materials for use in All-PSCs.

Solar energy is inexhaustible. Large-scale use of clean and renewable solar energy is of significant importance to optimize theenergy consumption structure, reduce environmental pollution and relieve the global greenhouse effect. Therefore, developing a cheaper and more efficient photovoltaic technology is an constant topic of solar energy utilization, which concerns the extentto which solar energy can replace fossil fuels in the future.