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Yana Kapoor, a freshman in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, could best be described as a champion. She  is winning races on the Formula 4 circuit while thriving in the classroom and hopes to either continue racing or pursue a career in industry after completing her education. 

Professors Rosa Espinosa Marzal and Cecilia Leal have discovered introducing trace amounts of water into salt-in-ionic liquid electrolytes disrupts ion clustering at the molecular level, significantly improving ionic conductivity and battery performance. Their findings, published in Science Advances, offer a promising new pathway toward sodium-ion batteries that could serve as a viable, more sustainable alternative to the lithium-ion technology that has long dominated portable electronics and electric vehicles.

Rosa Espinosa Marzal and her team discovered that positively charged hydrogels can achieve dramatically low friction against oppositely charged surfaces under hydrated conditions — the opposite of what basic electrostatics would predict — because tightly bound water layers at the material's surface generate a repulsive force that outcompetes electrostatic attraction. Published in Materials Horizons, the work advances the design of synthetic cartilage and medical device coatings while also raising important questions about the reliability of electrostatic attraction as a foundation for underwater hydrogel adhesive strategies.

Researchers led by Qing Cao have demonstrated a scalable way to directly and sequentially stack high-performance silicon circuits. This advance marks a critical step toward realizing the full potential of three-dimensional chips that could carry computing beyond the limits of traditional scaling.

Assistant Professor Chris Anderson has been awarded the 2026 James P. Gordon Memorial Speakership by the Optica Foundation, one of the most prestigious honors in quantum optics and photonics, recognizing his exceptional contributions to quantum photonics research. The honor places Anderson alongside a distinguished group of honorees, including fellow Illinois Grainger Engineering faculty member Paul Kwiat, who received the same recognition in 2017.

Professor Qian Chen and graduate student Puquan Pen worked with the University of Michigan and the University of Southern California to develop a graph theory-based mathematical framework that can quantify and predict the structural properties of nanoparticle assemblies across the full spectrum from ordered crystals to disordered clusters — a longstanding challenge in materials science. This breakthrough, published in Science, has broad implications for engineering advanced materials.