Physics graduate student Hefei Hu has been selected to receive a 2012/13 Yee Memorial Fellowship from the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois. The prestigious award is named for Illinois alumnus Warren Yee (PhD, Civil Engineering, 1943). Up to four Yee fellowships across all departments in the College are presented annually to recognize outstanding research achievements by Chinese graduate students.
Hu, who works in Professor Jian-Min "Jim" Zuo's group in Materials Science and Engineering, uses scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) and electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS) to characterize iron-based superconductors.
Discovered in 2008, these unusual materials have generated intense interest, not only for the fundamental physics underlying their superconductivity, but also because of their potential for energy-saving applications. Hu and his colleagues have used STEM to image nanoscale phase separation directly in Fe1+yTe1-xSex, which has been shown by EELS to be correlated with the fluctuation of d-band electrons in Fe.
"Our results provide the first evidence on the structural origin of some interesting properties of iron-based superconductors," said Hu.
Hu comes from Wuhan, China, the largest city in central China. "Wuhan is often referred to as the "Chicago" of China," said Hu, "because of its similar central location and role as a transportation hub." After graduating from Wuhan University, Hu received a master's degree in physics from the University of Manitoba before enrolling at the University of Illinois.
"The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is quite famous in China, and it has a great reputation, especially in engineering and science research," said Hu. "I felt honored to be accepted by the UI for study here."
Hu's experimental and computational results have been previously recognized by the Distinguished Scholar Award of the Microanalysis Society, which he won in 2009 and again in 2011. He also received a student fellowship to participate in the Frontiers of Electron Microscopy in Materials Science Conference in 2011.