The National Science Foundation announced that Fengnian Xia has received a 2016 Faculty Early Career Development CAREER Award. Xia is the Barton L. Weller Assistant Professor in Engineering and Science at Yale’s School of Engineering and Applied Science. As an electrical engineer, he will use the monetary award to study the properties of graphene, a single atom layer of carbon, and its possible uses for infrared devices and applications, including thermal imaging, night vision and free-space optical communications.

Xia holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Princeton received in 2005. His undergraduate degree is from Tsinghua University in Beijing. Xia joined Yale’s School of Engineering and Applied Science in 2013, the same year he was listed as one of MIT’s Innovators Under 35 for research on replacing silicon with graphene to control the flow of electricity. Prior to Yale, Xia was at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York.