北京时间2023年4月7日晚八点，iCANX Talks 第138期将在iCANX平台上线！本期我们邀请到西安电子科技大学 Rusen Yang 教授、加拿大女王大学 Bhavin J. Shastri 教授两位嘉宾进行分享！更多精彩，敬请期待！

Supramolecular assembly of metabolites produces novel materials with hierarchical structures, good biological properties, and unique physical properties. They are an essential biomimetic material, and self-assembly structures with excellent piezoelectric properties enable the study of the electromechanical coupling properties in biomaterials. 

However, the randomly oriented piezoelectric domains adversely affect the performance of piezoelectric biomaterials, and uniform polarization is needed for the material to show a macroscopic piezoelectric effect and to improve the performance of a piezoelectric device. We combine theoretical calculations and experimental studies to synthesize piezoelectric biomaterials based on amino acid and peptide self-assembly.

We also revealed the degradation behavior of peptide-based nanogenerators in different solutions. The research of peptide self-assembly materials has strongly promoted the discovery of environmentally friendly biomimetic functional materials and the advancement of new energy, advanced sensing, and other technologies, improving and enhancing people's health and quality of life.

Dr. Rusen Yang is a Hua Shan professor and vice dean of the School of Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology at Xidian University in China. He obtained his M.S. and B.S. in Condensed Matter Physics from Jilin University, China. In 2007, he received his Ph.D. degree in Materials Science and Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology, where he continued as a Post-Doctoral Associate till 2010. 

From 2010 to 2018, he worked as an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Minnesota, where he was elected as a McKnight Land Grant Professor in 2013. He has focused his research on synthesizing new nanomaterials and exploring their application for energy harvesting and sensing applications. He has developed new processes to achieve nanowires with controlled orientation and post-growth approaches to align nanostructures.

He has created piezoelectric biomaterials with controlled polarization and applied them for energy harvesting. He has published over 150 papers in peer-reviewed journals that have been cited over 12,000 times, and his transformative work won him NSF Career Award, 3M NTFA Award, and Nano Energy Award. His currently a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) and a Deputy Editor of Research. 

Artificial intelligence (AI) powered by neural networks has enabled applications in many fields (medicine, finance, autonomous vehicles). Digital implementations of neural networks are limited in speed and energy efficiency. Neuromorphic photonics aims to build processors that use light and photonic device physics to mimic neurons and synapses in the brain for distributed and parallel processing while offering sub-nanosecond latencies and extending the domain of AI and neuromorphic computing applications.

We will discuss photonic neural networks enabled by CMOS-compatible silicon photonics. We will highlight applications that require low latency and high bandwidth, including wideband radio-frequency signal processing, fiber-optic communications, and nonlinear programming (solving optimization problems). We will briefly introduce a quantum photonic neural network that can learn to act as near-perfect components of quantum technologies and discuss the role of weak nonlinearities.

Prof. Bhavin J. Shastri is an Assistant Professor of Engineering Physics at Queen’s University and a Faculty Affiliate at the Vector Institute. He was a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University. He received a Ph.D. in electrical engineering (photonics) from McGill University in 2012. Dr. Shastri is the recipient of the 2022 SPIE Early Career Achievement Award and the 2020 IUPAP Young Scientist Prize in Optics "for his pioneering contributions to neuromorphic photonics" from the ICO. 

He is a co-author of the book Neuromorphic Photonics, a term he helped coin. He has published more than 90 journal articles and 110 conference proceedings, 7 book chapters, and given over 90 invited talks, including 5 keynotes and 5 tutorials. Dr. Shastri is a Senior Member of Optica and IEEE.