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Susan Fullerton, PhD
Associate Professor Bicentennial Board of Visitors Faculty Fellow Vice Chair for Graduate Education
907 Benedum Hall | 3700 O’Hara Street | Pittsburgh, PA 15261 P: 412-624-2079
fullerton@pitt.edu www.fullertonlab.pitt.edu
Next-generation Electronics
The Nanoionics and Electronics Lab reimagines the role of ions in electronics and smart materials. Applications include logic, memory, hardware security, neuromorphic computing, and biodegradable plastics.
Susan Fullerton is an Associate Professor, Bicentennial Board of Visitors Faculty Fellow, and Vice Chair for Graduate Education in the Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering. She earned her PhD in Chemical Engineering at Penn State in 2009, and joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Notre Dame as a Research Assistant Professor. In 2015 she established the Nanoionics and Electronics Lab at Pitt as a tenure-track Assistant Professor, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2020. Fullerton’s work has been recognized by an NSF CAREER award, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, a Marion Milligan Mason award for women in the chemical sciences from AAAS, and a Ralph E. Powe Jr. Faculty Award from ORAU. For her teaching, Fullerton was awarded the 2018 James Pommersheim Award for Excellence in Teaching in Chemical Engineering at Pitt.
The interplay between ions and electrons governs processes as common as the biochemistry essential for life and the performance of devices as ubiquitous as batteries. The energy that powers our smart phones and laptops is stored by ions, yet when we peer past the battery and examine the device-scale electronics, ions are nowhere to be found. This is a missed opportunity because the coupling between ions and electrons/holes in unconventional electronic materials – such as two-dimensional (2D) semiconductors – has is uncovering exciting new properties of these ultra-thin materials (e.g., spin-polarization, superconductivity and others). While many groups use ions as a tool to uncover new properties of 2D semiconductors, we ions as an active device component to impart completely new device functionalities. For example, we have invented a monolayer-thick ion-conductor that introduces bistability for application as a flash memory (Liang et al., Nano Letters 2019, 29, 12); we are custom-synthesizing electrolytes to induce strain in 2D materials (Woeppel et al., ACS AMI 2020, 12, 40850; Xu et al., ACS AMI 2019, 11, 35879); and we are using ions to make the next-generation of smart materials (Chao et al., Adv. Func. Materials 2019 1907950). Please visit www.fullertonlab.pitt.edu and check out our recent publications, including a review article highlighting ions and 2D materials (Xu & Fullerton-Shirey J. Physics: Materials 2020 3, 3).
Outreach: Polymer Crystallization on Your iphone
The Fullerton group enjoys teaching budding scientists about materials. We developed a demonstration where a smartphone can be turned into a microscope to observe polymer crystallization in real time!
