ME Assistant Professor Pramod Sangi Reddy has received the NSF CAREER award for his proposal, “Heat and Charge Transport in Metal-Molecule-Metal Junctions.”
The abstract reads, “The proposed research seeks to understand the transport of heat and charge transport phenomena in nanometer-sized molecular junctions. An experimental technique that will enable the study of novel heat and charge transport phenomena that are expected to arise in nanometer-sized molecular junctions will be developed. Using this technique, experiments will be conducted on a variety of single molecule and multiple molecule junctions to elucidate – for the first time – the relationship between the structure of molecular junctions and their thermal transport and thermoelectric properties. The proposed research can potentially impact the field of thermoelectric energy conversion; once the dependence of transport properties on the structure of the molecular junctions is understood, it will be possible to tune the heat and charge transport in molecular junctions to create inexpensive and efficient thermoelectric materials using metal-molecule heterostructures.”