ChBe welcomes two new Faculty Members aboard.
Dr Owen Shea Fenton has joined ChBE as an Assistant Professor.
Prior to his NUS appointment, Owen was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT in the laboratory of Professor Robert Langer. He graduated in 2016 with a PhD from MIT under the supervision of Professors Robert Langer and Daniel Anderson. During his PhD research, he developed a key appreciation for the fundamental design of nanomaterials while creating RNA based therapies for liver, lung, and spleen disorders within living systems. He focused on the creation and characterization of soft matter for immunological research during his postdoc research, with specific efforts towards the design of a catalyst and initiator free synthetic hydrogel platform with application as a cell replacement scaffold for in vivo application; this technology is currently being adapted for additive manufacturing approaches to create customizable 3-dimensional cell culture matrices for tissue engineering applications. Additionally, his research has also focused on the design, formulation, and implementation of a shear-thinning hydrogel platform that can be impregnated with recruiting factors to localize target cell populations to a site of injection. He has plans to embark on research relating to COVID19, cancer, and infectious disease research using RNA therapeutics.
Dr Hou Yi is appointed Assistant Professor in our Department under the NUS Presidential Young Professorship.
Prior to his NUS appointment, Yi was a postdoctoral fellow in the Professor Edward Sargent group at the University of Toronto in Canada and focusing on the investigation of optical and electronic properties of hybrid perovskite semiconductors, the understanding of photophysics and transport properties in single- and multi-junction photovoltaics for renewable energy applications. He earned his PhD in 2017 from the Professor Christoph Brabec group in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany. His doctoral research focused on the understanding and design of interfaces in solution-processed optoelectronics. He was awarded SAOT fellowship (Graduate school of German “Excellence Initiative”) from 2013 to 2017, and the Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Students Abroad in 2016. Thereafter, he joined the Clarendon Laboratory Department of Physics at the University of Oxford as a visiting scholar and worked with Professor Henry Snaith, focusing on the universal charge transfer doping effect between organic and metal oxides in perovskite-based photovoltaics. In 2019 to 2020, he is a visiting postdoctoral fellow in Professor Zhenan Bao’s group at Stanford University where he works on laminated perovskite photovoltaics and skin electronics.
