The Board of Regents recently appointed Georgia Tech's Dr. Zhong Lin Wang as the Hightower Chair in Materials Science and Engineering.  This senior position is a focal point within the School for research and teaching.  As such, this Hightower Chair is expected to foster interactions among researchers and educators across the Institute who are involved with polymeric materials having a biological origin or function.  The successful candidate should have established outstanding research programs, a demonstrated interest in fostering collaboration, and a commitment to high-quality teaching, research and mentorship.

Dr. Wang has made original and innovative contributions to the synthesis, discovery, characterization and understanding of fundamental physical properties of oxide nanobelts and nanowires, as well as applications of nanowires in energy sciences, electronics, optoelectronics and biological science. He invented and pioneered the in-situ technique for measuring the mechanical and electrical properties of a single nanotube/nanowire inside a transmission electron microscope (TEM). He is the world leader in ZnO nanostructure research in the last decade. His discovery and breakthroughs in developing nanogenerators establish the principle and technological road map for harvesting mechanical energy from environment and biological systems for powering a personal electronics. The field created by him on self-powered nanosystems inspired the worldwide effort in academia and industry for studying energy for micro-nano-systems, which is now a distinct disciplinary in energy research and future sensor networks. He coined and pioneered the field of piezotronics and piezo-phototronics by introducing piezoelectric potential gated charge transport process in fabricating new electronic and optoelectronic devices, which have potential applications in MEMS/NEMS, nanorobotics, human-electronics interface, sensors, medical diagnosis and photovoltaic.