The Materials Research Society (MRS) and the European Materials Research Society (E-MRS) have partnered to highlight the achievements of the EU-40 Materials Prize and the MRS Mid-Career Researcher Award recipients at each respective Society meeting. This E-MRS award is reserved for researchers showing exceptional promise as leaders in materials science, having performed the research for which this prize is awarded while working in Europe.

Xinliang Feng is a full professor and chair of the Molecular Functional Materials Department at Technische Universität Dresden (TU Dresden), Germany. He has published more than 420 research articles and has received the IUPAC Prize for Young Chemists (2009), European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant Award (2012), Journal of Materials Chemistry Lectureship Award (2013), ChemComm Emerging Investigator Lectureship (2014), Fellowship of the Royal Society of Chemistry (2014), Small Young Innovator Award (2017), and the Hamburg Science Award (2017). He is an Advisory Board member for Advanced Materials, Journal of Materials Chemistry A, ChemNanoMat, Energy Storage Materials, and Small Methods and Chemistry-An Asian Journal. He is the head of the ESF Young Research Group at the Graphene Center at TU Dresden, and working package leader of WP Functional Foams & Coatings for the European Commission’s pilot project “Graphene Flagship.”

In his lecture, Feng will present recent efforts on bottom-up synthetic approaches toward novel 1D nanoribbons and organic 2D materials with structural control at the atomic/molecular level or at the mesoscale. Fundamental electronic, magnetic, and mechanical properties will be discussed.