Dr. ZHENG Zheyang, a 2021 PhD graduate from the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering (ECE), has been named the winner of the School of Engineering (SENG) PhD Research Excellence Award 2021-22. He is currently a Research Assistant Professor at ECE.

Dr. Zheng’s research focuses on wide-bandgap semiconductor electronic devices and systems. He works on two materials, gallium nitrite (GaN) and silicon carbide (SiC), for application scenarios including high-frequency wireless communication and high-efficiency power conversion. His most representative work, which was published in Nature Electronics in 2021, is the world’s first complete set of elementary complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) logic gates and multistage integrated circuits (IC) made by GaN.

Since joining HKUST in 2016 as an awardee of the Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme (HKPFS) and until his graduation after five years, Dr. Zheng had co-authored more than 60 papers (with eight as the first author) in prestigious journals and conferences, including Nature Electronics, IEEE Electron Device Letters, and IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM), to name a few. He had an h-index of 14 and over 450 citations in Google Scholar as of December 2021. He is also the co-inventor of three filed patents. His work on GaN CMOS IC was selected as a finalist of “Top 10 Research Progress on Semiconductors in China for 2021”.

At the award ceremony, Dr. Zheng shared his rewarding experience in the engineering research journey at HKUST with current research postgraduate students. He firstly expressed his gratitude to his PhD advisor Prof. Kevin CHEN, Chair Professor of Electronic and Computer Engineering, for his academic guidance and substantial support over the years as well as those to come. As an experimenter, he particularly highlighted the Nanosystem Fabrication Facility (NFF), a central research infrastructure at HKUST with top-notch facilities, professional staff, and cooperative fellow users, which he believes is an indispensable enabler to turn imagination into reality.

Dr. Zheng then discussed uncertainty and failure. He agrees that a PhD journey is, and should be, full of uncertainty, “but doesn’t uncertainty sometimes make life more interesting?” Due to the uncertainty, he prefers vague plans rather than a must-do list which might involve a lot of uncontrollable factors, and also prefers focusing effort in those that “could be controlled by our own hands”. He noted that failure is inevitable in research, but it is also an important source of informative feedback. Therefore, it is rational to make use of failure and turn it into something valuable, despite the unjoyous, and probably painful, process. He ended by encouraging his fellow research students to maintain a balance between research and personal life, which he thinks could keep one’s life hopeful even when either side is temporarily less satisfactory.

Established in 2011, the SENG PhD Research Excellence Award scheme recognizes the outstanding achievements of our PhD students and recent graduates who have made influential contributions to their discipline during PhD studies at HKUST. This year, certificates were also presented to the shortlisted finalists Dr. ZHANG Hongming, Computer Science and Engineering, and Dr. XIAO Fei, Chemical and Biological Engineering, both 2021 graduates.