The University of North Carolina’s Research Opportunities Initiative, UNC ROI, will provide three new grants worth a total of $6.2 million to teams from six universities in the UNC system. UNC-Chapel Hill projects were among the grant recipients.
“The research produced by our institutions continues to positively impact the lives of all North Carolinians through advancements in areas such as healthcare and clean energy,” said President Margaret Spellings. “We’re grateful to state lawmakers for their strong support of UNC ROI’s important work.”
Professor Jinsong Huang, discussing instrumentation settings with Postdoctoral Research Assistan Zhibin Yang.
One of the winning projects comes from Applied Physical Sciences, led by Professor Jinsong Huang. The partnering institutions are North Carolina Central University, NC State, and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. This project will capture the unprecedented opportunity brought by the revolutionary discovery of a new class of hybrid perovskite materials, a type of low-cost, efficient solar cell. The project could potentially result in innovations in clean energy, imaging, and radiation sensing. The team includes Professors James Cahoon and Wei You. Together, they have established the Center of Hybrid Materials Enabled Electronic Technology for these technologies, with the aim to accelerate the commercialization process of these technologies, which will have a major impact on the state’s economy.