Liang Ma, Graduate Research Assistant in Materials Science and Engineering at Illinois, recently received the 2016 Annual Innovation Award for Outstanding Ph.D. Thesis from Durgam and Subha Chakrapani Family Trust. The award is in recognition of an outstanding Ph.D. thesis characterized by innovation and potential for commercialization in the field of materials science and engineering.
At the first MatSE Department Colloquium of the Spring 2017 semester, he was presented with the medallion award while Assistant Professor Maass described Liang's accomplishments. "He is working with Prof. Andrew M. Smith from the Department of Bioengineering on development of next-generation quantum dots (QDs) for clinical diagnosis of cancer. He has 24 published works, one book chapter, two inventions, and his work is truly incredible," Maass said. In contrast to commercial water-soluble QDs from Invitrogen that are widely applied today, but with only limited quantitative capability, these new QDs have tremendous advantages in the field of quantitative bioimaging in terms of size, stability and valency. His work is currently funded by the Faculty Entrepreneurial Fellow program at Illinois to support the commercialization of this technology through a labeling kit based on QDs, which is expected to begin commercial development through our campus this year.