Three PhD student and recent graduates from different departments have been named the recipients of the School of Engineering PhD Research Excellence Awards 2013-14.
 

The awardees are Adetoyese Olajire Oyedun, PhD student from the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Dr Denis Guangyin Chen, 2013 graduate from the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, and Dr Biao Zhang, 2013 graduate from the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.

The awards recognize the outstanding achievements of the School’s PhD students and recent graduates, being granted to those who have made influential contributions to their discipline during PhD studies at HKUST.

Adetoyese’s research focuses on solving the problem of high-energy usage during the pyrolysis of solid wastes, e.g. bamboo, sawdust, waste tyre, empty fruit bunch, and plastics. He has proposed three different operating strategies to reduce the overall energy usage during pyrolysis and to improve the quality of the products. He has published 14 peer-reviewed papers, 7 as first author, in reputable international journals related to energy and thermochemical research and has presented his work at 5 international conferences. He is a Hong Kong PhD Fellowship awardee in 2010 and has received a number of awards in the past few years, including the Air Products Best Postgraduate Student Award for Excellent Research from his department.

Denis’ research seeks to address a number of design challenges in micro-electronic sensors which have important societal consequences, including complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) image sensors, compressive imaging, low-power SAR ADC with error-correction, biomedical implants, smart infrastructures, and laser Doppler imaging (LDI). He has published 7 papers in international journals, with 2 of them in IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, a top journal in the field of micro-electronics. He has presented his research work at 4 international conferences. Currently, he is a research associate in the University’s Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering and a co-investigator in the HKD $20 million HKUST-MIT Research Alliance Consortium.

Biao’s research centers on advanced materials for energy storage devices, including Li-ion batteries, Li-Air batteries and supercapacitors. His PhD work focused on fabrication of metal oxide/nanocarbon composites and their electrochemical performance as electrodes in Li-ion batteries and supercapacitors. His work has achieved exceptional capacities under high current densities along with excellent capacity retention after long-term cycles. He has published 23 peer-reviewed papers in prestigious journals such as Energy & Environmental Science and Advanced Energy Materials. These papers have been cited for more than 250 times during the past three years. Currently, he is a visiting scholar in the University’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.