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Ran Cheng, an Assistant Professor of ECE, has recently received a $250,000 award from the W.M. Keck foundation, along with three renowned experimentalists. The project is led by Prof. Enrique Del Barco from the University of Central Florida.
The W. M. Keck Foundation announces its Science and Engineering Grants twice each year, in June and December, respectively. In June 2024, only six teams were awarded this highly competitive grant:
https://www.wmkeck.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Abstracts_J24_SE.pdf
The team Ran Cheng has joined proposed a rather bold idea to explore the exciting possibility of dissipationless spintronics using an emerging class of materials known as magnetic topological insulators. While the central idea was initially pioneered from a theoretical perspective by Ran Cheng, its experimental realization incurs an entirely different level of challenges, in spite of the strong team gathered by three experimentalists of complementary expertise and Ran Cheng as the theorist.
For this reason, the proposed experimental efforts were once deemed too risky to fund by several federal funding agencies. The W. M. Keck Foundation, on the other hand, exclusively targets such high-risk and high-impact ideas, and funds "high-risk and high-impact work of leading researchers to lay the groundwork for new paradigms, technologies, and discoveries that will save lives, provide innovative solutions and add to our understanding of the world."
Since joining UC Riverside in 07/2018, Ran Cheng has been leading a highly productive research group in the broad field of condensed matter physics.