Samson A. Jenekhe
2006 Catalyst Article
Research in Professor Jenekhe’s laboratory is primarily focused on organic electronics, including materials synthesis and thin film processing, device engineering, and applications. The group is developing organic light-emitting diodes for flat-panel displays and lighting, plastic solar cells, and thin film transistors for low cost electronic circuits and systems. Among Dr. Jenekhe’s many activities during the past year was editorship of a special issue devoted to organic electronics in the journal Chemistry of Materials published November 2004.
In the past year, the group welcomed new graduate students Richard Champion, Ms. Pei-Tzu Wu, and Angela Gifford to the lab. Postdoctoral research associate Xiangxing Kong left in May for a research assistant professor position in the UW mechanical engineering department. Professor Eun-mi Han returned in July to South Korea after a sabbatical year here. Andrew Grossman completed an MS degree and plans to pursue a career in environmentally friendly technologies. The group also said farewell to Christopher Tonzola who completed the PhD (in chemistry) with a thesis on n-type conjugated polymers for optoelectronics. He is now a research chemist with Avon Products, Inc., Suffern, New York.
Amit Babel was named a finalist for the 2005 Frank J. Padden Jr. Award for outstanding graduate thesis research of the Polymer Physics Division of the American Physical Society (APS). He was selected for his work on n-channel polymer thin film transistors, which has dramatically increased our understanding of electron transport in polymer semiconductors. He gave a talk at a special symposium for the award finalists at the APS March meeting in Los Angeles.
Professor Jenekhe traveled extensively this year. In January, he presented invited lectures at National Taiwan University, Academia Sinica in Taipei, National Tsing-Hua University (Hsinchu, Taiwan), and Pusan National University in South Korea. He and some of his graduate students presented invited and contributed papers at the APS March meeting in Los Angeles and the MRS spring meeting in San Francisco. He gave a seminar at Norfolk State University in early May and was the keynote lecturer at a conference on self-assembled chemical structures held at the University of Montreal in Canada. He was an invited speaker at an ACS POLY Photonics 2005 workshop in Orlando in June. In early July, he served on an NSF site visit panel that reviewed Columbia University’s Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center (NSEC). In spite of the heat and humidity, Professor Jenekhe enjoyed very much his two-week, four-city lecture trip to Japan in July and early August, including the International Polymer Conference at Fukuoka, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Kyoto University, and Tokyo Institute of Technology. He spent a day as a tourist visiting some of the famous shrines and temples in Nara with his Japanese hosts.
