Biography:

Eui-Hyeok Yang is a Professor of the Mechanical Engineering Department at Stevens Institute of Technology. He was a Senior Member of the Engineering Staff at NASA\'s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He received a number of awards, including the prestigious Lew Allen Award for Excellence at JPL in 2003 in recognition of his excellence in advancing the use of MEMS-based actuators for NASA\'s space applications. He is an Associate Editor and/or Editorial Board of several journals including the IEEE Sensors Journal. As Principal Investigator, he has been responsible for obtaining extremely competitive research funding from several federal agencies including NSF, AFOSR, US Army, NRO, NASA and DARPA (including 6 NSF and 3 AFOSR grants, and 5 NASA and 3 NRO contracts) with the total amount exceeding $7M.

Abstract:

My group\'s research is aimed at understanding some of the basic principles of smart microfluidics and 1D/2D material growth, solving problems in the implementation of these materials. I will present two different topics. First topic is our development of the low pressure chemical vapor deposition (LPCVD) growth of 1D and 2D materials. We grow large-grain single crystalline or large-scale polycrystalline monolayers of MoS2, MoSe2, WSe2 and WS2 along with other transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs). Our unique growth method permits the growth of TMDs on the ‘contacted’ areas only, enabling the chip-scale fabrication of heterostructures in arbitrary shapes without lithography. We also demonstrate an approach toward controlled CNT growth atop graphene substrates, where the reaction equilibrium between the source hydrocarbon decomposition and carbon saturation into/precipitation from the catalyst nanoparticles shifts toward CNT growth, rather than graphene consumption. Second, we demonstrate a novel in situ control of the droplet pinning on the polymer surface, enabling the control of droplet adhesion from strongly pinned to extremely slippery (and vice versa). The adhesion of organic droplets on the surfaces dramatically switches in situ (i.e., without the removal of liquid droplets), presenting a great potential for in situ manipulation and control of liquid droplets for various applications including lab-on-chip technologies, oil separation, and water treatment.