Columbia University

In 2013 James Hone, Wang Fong-Jen Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Columbia Engineering, and colleagues at Columbia demonstrated that they could dramatically improve the performance of graphene—highly conducting two-dimensional (2D) carbon—by encapsulating it in boron nitride (BN), an insulating material with a similar layered structure. In work published this week in the Advance Online Publication on Nature Nanotechnology’s website, researchers at Columbia Engineering, Harvard, Cornell, University of Minnesota, Yonsei University in Korea, Danish Technical University, and the Japanese National Institute of Materials Science have shown that the performance of another 2D material—molybdenum disulfide (MoS2)—can be similarly improved by BN-encapsulation.

For more than two years, Marshall Cox PhD’13 and John Kymissis, associate professor of electrical engineering, have been working on their startup Radiator Labs. Their first consumer product—the Cozy—is now in production and set for delivery next fall, just in time for winter’s cold blasts. And also just in time to win Popular Science Magazine's Annual Invention Awards as one of the most exciting innovations the PopSci editors have seen this past year.