Introducing our 2022 Early Career Advisory Board Members

On board: Please join us in welcoming Anindita Das, Amelie Heuer-Jungemann, Wee-Jun Ong, Jungwon Park, Zhiyuan Zeng, and Ye Zhang to our Early Career Advisory Board! In 2020, ChemNanoMat, Chemistry-An Asian Journal, and the Asian Journal of Organic Chemistry welcomed their first Early Career Advisory Board (ECAB) members. It has been such a pleasure over the last two years to get to know these talented scientists and to work with them to make ChemNanoMat a top choice for emerging researchers in materials chemistry and nanoscience. This year, we say goodbye to the most-senior members of the original ECAB and thank them for all their contributions. Among other collaborations, the ECAB members played a key role in shaping our special collection highlighting work by early career researchers. If you have not already checked out the excellent work in this collection, do so now! In addition, we are excited to announce that two former ECAB members, Roxanne Kieltyka and Xian-Jun Loh, will join the International Advisory Board starting in January 2022. Pralay Santra, Luisa Whittaker-Brooks, and Nobuhiko Yanai will also extend their terms on the ECAB by another two years. They will be joined by a new group of accomplished early career researchers, whose biographies can be found below. Please join us in welcoming them to the board! Anindita Das received her M.Sc. degree in Chemistry from the University of Calcutta in 2009 and Ph.D. degree from the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS), India in 2014 under the guidance of Professor Suhrit Ghosh. Subsequently, she worked as an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow with Professor Patrick Theato at the University of Hamburg, Germany during 2014-2016. In 2016, she joined the group of Professor E.W. Meijer at the Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands for a second postdoctoral stint. In 2017, she returned to IACS as a Faculty Fellow, where she is currently holding a position of Assistant Professor in the School of Applied and Interdisciplinary Sciences. Her research interests include supramolecular assemblies of functional π-systems and macromolecules employing halogen bonding and other underexplored supramolecular interactions, crystallization driven macromolecular assemblies and biodegradable polymers. Amelie Heuer-Jungemann obtained her M.Sc. in Chemistry with Biochemistry from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland (2011) before moving on to do a Ph.D. in Biophysics at the University of Southampton (2015). For her Ph.D. work on “gold nanoparticle-DNA conjugates for biomedical applications” she was awarded the EPSRC Doctoral Prize Award and her work was also awarded the Silver medal in the biomedical science section at STEM for Britain. She then moved to the Ludwig Maximilians University Munich as a postdoc with Tim Liedl working on DNA origami. In 2020 she was awarded the prestigious Emmy Noether grant from the German Science Foundation. Since August 2020 she has been the head of the DNA hybrid nanomaterials group at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry. Her work is focused on using DNA origami and DNA origami-silica hybrid nanostructures for biomedical applications, to study protein-protein interactions and catalysis. Wee-Jun Ong received his B.Eng. and Ph.D. degrees in Chemical Engineering from Monash University. In 2016, he joined IMRE, Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) in Singapore as a Scientist. Since 2019, he is an Associate Professor in the School of Energy and Chemical Engineering at Xiamen University Malaysia. In 2019, he was a Visiting Scientist at Technische Universität Dresden, Germany. He was a Visiting Professor at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA from 2019 to 2020. Starting from 2021, he becomes the Director of Center of Excellence for NaNo Energy & Catalysis Technology (CONNECT). His research interests focus on photocatalytic, photoelectrocatalytic and electrochemical H2O splitting, CO2 reduction and N2 fixation. He has been named as a Highly Cited Researcher by Clarivate Analytics for three consecutive years (2019 to 2021) and has been the Lead Guest Editor at Small, ChemSusChem, Solar RRL and Chemistry – A European Journal. Jungwon Park received his B.S. degree from the Department of Chemistry, POSTECH, South Korea, in 2003, and his Ph.D. degree from the Department of Chemistry, University of California, Berkeley, in 2012. After postdoctoral research at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, he started a faculty position at the School of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Seoul National University, in 2016, and he currently serves as an associate professor jointly affiliated with the Center for Nanoparticle Research, Institute for Basic Science (IBS). His research interests include the in situ study of nanomaterials, liquid-phase TEM, phase transitions, interface chemistry, and low-dimensional materials. Zhiyuan Zeng obtained his B.E. and M.E. from Central South University, Zhejiang University in 2006 and 2008, respectively. He completed his Ph.D. with Prof. Hua Zhang at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (2013). He joined Dr. Haimei Zheng's group as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (2013–2017). After working for Applied Materials Inc. in Silicon Valley (2017–2019), he joined City University of Hong Kong as an Assistant Professor in 2019. His research focuses on transition metal dichalcogenide and transition metal oxide based materials for energy and environmental applications. He has been listed as a Highly Cited Researcher (Top 1%, Clarivate Analytics) in 2020 and 2018. He has also been listed as the World′s Top 2% Scientists in Nanosci. & Nanotechnol. for single year in 2021 and 2020 (by Stanford University). Ye Zhang is currently an associate professor at the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the Nanjing University. She received her Ph.D. degree in Macromolecular Chemistry and Physics from Fudan University and then joined the Harvard Medical School as a postdoctoral research fellow. Her research focuses on the development of soft electronics including batteries, sensors, and bioelectronic devices.