Source: School of Materials Science and Engineering
Written by: School of Materials Science and Engineering
Edited by: Wang Dongmei

Professor Huixia Luo, who is from the School of Materials Science and Engineering at Sun Yat-sen University, has been honored with the prestigious IAAM Scientist Medal of year 2018 for notable and outstanding research in the field of Composite Materials & Technology during award ceremony of International Association of Advanced Materials held on 4th June 2018 in the Composite Materials Congress at Conference Center, M/S Mariella, Stockholm, Sweden. Only seven scientists are granted the award in this congress.
 

Professor Huixia Luo (middle) at the 2018 IAAM Scientist Medal award ceremony

 
Professor Luo was invited to give a keynote lecture entitled “Discovery of New Transition Metal Dichalcogenide Superconductors” in the congress. Superconductivity is a phenomenon of exactly zero electrical resistance and expulsion of magnetic flux fields occurring in certain materials, called superconductors, when cooled below a characteristic critical temperature. Superconductivity is a quantum mechanical phenomenon. Since the superconductor was discovered in 1911, the investigation of superconductor has been the research focus in condensed state physics. Owing to the low transition temperature, it is difficult to apply it on a large scale, the famous one of which is high temperature superconductor (HTS) that the transition temperature is higher than the liquid nitrogen temperature. However, the HTS has a slow pace to develop due to be lack of theoretical basis. The discovery of new transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) superconductors has been a bright spot in superconductor field in recent years. Professor Luo introduced the design, synthesis and properties of TMD superconductors, which was highly praised by the scientists present at the meeting.

IAAM is a principal international organization of Advanced Materials researchers, whose purpose is to provide a research and education forum for the rapidly expanding field of Advanced Materials. There are currently more than 5,000 members from universities and institutes around the world. The association regularly organizes various academic conferences, including the Advanced Materials World Congress, European Advanced Materials Congress, American Advanced Materials Congress and Asian Advanced Materials Congress, and also holds parallel thematic forums. Based on the achievement over the last decade years, the medal is finally awarded to researchers who have made important contributions in the field of advanced materials.

Professor Luo is engaged in searching for the novel functional inorganic materials (oxygen transport membrane materials) and the condensed physical materials (such as new superconductor, magnetic material, topological insulators, Dirac and Weyl semimetals, etc). In recent years, Professor Luo has published over 30 SCI papers in internationally renowned academic journals such as PNAS, Nature Comm, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., Chem Mater, Chem Comm, J. Mater. Chem.: A, PRB, etc. The number of citations was nearly 815 times (google citation, on June 14th, 2018). She joined Sun Yat-sen University in 2016 after working as a postdoc at Princeton University (Prof. Robert Cava’s group) for 4 years. She received her PhD degree in physical materials science (2012) from Leibniz University Hanover (Prof. Juergen Caro’s group). This award shows that Professor Luo’s research has been recognized by international peers in this field.
 

Professor Huixia Luo’s IAAM Scientist Medal