Three recent graduates from different departments have been named the recipients of the School of Engineering PhD Research Excellence Awards 2014-15.

The awardees are Dr Feng Xuan from the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Dr Yanjiao Chen from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and Dr Shu Yang from the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering. All of them are 2014 graduates.

The School of Engineering has established the PhD Research Excellence Award scheme since 2011 in recognition of the outstanding achievements by our PhD students and recent graduates. The awards are granted to those who have made influential contributions to their discipline during PhD studies at HKUST.

Dr Feng Xuan

Dr Xuan’s research work at HKUST mainly focuses on electrochemical nucleic acid sensing technologies. During the past four years, he has developed a series of strategies to realize “immobilization-free” electrochemical nucleic acid sensing with high sensitivity and selectivity. These works have led to five high-impact journal publications (one of them highlighted in Analytical Chemistry as “accelerated article”, one highlighted in Journal of the American Chemical Society Spotlights) and he has presented his research works at 5 international conferences. Notably, his works have been cited over 130 times during the past three years. Besides journal publications, one US patent and one Chinese patent are also filed based on his works which shows that his works are not only academically interesting, but also have potential commercial value. In addition, two General Research Fund (GRF) grants of totally HK$2 million were funded based on his PhD thesis work. These achievements are all excellent recognition of the high quality of his research work at HKUST.

Currently, he is a postdoc researcher of Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, USA.

Dr Yanjiao Chen

Dr Chen has been actively working on the interdisciplinary research field combining wireless networks and microeconomics. She has studied the non-cooperative, competitive interactions among various parties in wireless networks using game theory and optimization as modeling means and solution tools. She has published more than 20 papers (15 first-author papers) in top IEEE journals and conferences. She has received many prestigious scholarships, including Hong Kong PhD Fellowship, Google Hong Kong Anita Borg Scholarship (2013 & 2014), Google PhD Scholarship and HK Telecom Institute of Information Technology Post-Graduate Excellence Scholarship, to name a few.

She will be a postdoc in the iQua Research Group at the University of Toronto, Canada in April 2015.

Dr Shu Yang

Dr Yang’s research works focus on the core technology and physical mechanisms of wide bandgap gallium nitride semiconductor devices for the next generation of energy-efficient power conversion systems. In particular, she has revealed the underlying physics and developed a technology to overcome the grand dielectric/semiconductor interface challenge for enhanced device stability and reliability. She has authored and co-authored over 40 papers (with 14 first-authored) in top-notch international journals and conference proceedings, including IEEE Electron Device Letters, IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, Applied Physics Letters, International Electron Devices Meeting (2013 & 2014), etc. She was the only invited student speaker in 2012 International Workshop on Nitride Semiconductors held in Sapporo, Japan. Her research works have been widely cited and featured in industry magazines such as Compound Semiconductor and Semiconductor Today.

Currently, she is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering at HKUST.