Yanan “Laura” Wang, an assistant professor with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), has earned the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Early Career Research Program Award. Her five-year research project, funded for $876,663, began in August 2025 and is titled Quantum Photonic-Phononic Transduction Empowered by Van Der Waals Layered Crystals. Wang works in UNL’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and was a two-time Seed Grant researcher with Nebraska’s Emergent Quantum Materials and Technologies (EQUATE) collaboration, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). She previously received Nebraska EPSCoR’s FIRST Award, and she also earned NSF EPSCoR Research Fellows support for a two-year project on Integrated Photonic Platforms Empowered by Solution-Processed Wide-Bandgap Perovskites.
Her DOE project’s research focuses on a special family of materials: van der Waals layered crystals. Just like the category’s hallmark material, graphene, these crystals consist of atomically thin layers held together by weak forces, Wang said, enabling precise control of their electronic, optical, and mechanical properties for next-generation classical and quantum devices. By studying how these materials and systems serve devices and how energy is lost along related processes, Wang’s efforts could help develop new kinds of devices and circuits that use both light and sound to process information in a quantum way. Such advances could lead to changes in how data is handled, especially in quantum computers and communication systems. The DOE Early Career Research Program is a prestigious initiative that supports outstanding early-career scientists in pursuing high-impact research, with only 80–90 researchers supported across the nation each year. 