UAH Chemical and Materials Engineering Associate Professor Dr. Yu Lei named Fulbright U.S. Scholar

Dr. Yu Lei, associate professor and interim chair in the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), has been named a Fulbright U.S. Scholar. He will travel to Prague, Czech Republic, in January 2024 to continue his research into developing new catalysts at the J. Heyrovsky Institute of Physical Chemistry at the Czech Academy of Science. He has taught at UAH, a part of The University of Alabama System, since 2013.

“I’m very excited, looking forward to visiting there,” Dr. Lei says. “I can be doing research for the Fulbright scholarship, doing my sabbatical, and be an ambassador all at the same time, connecting with people in different countries. My research is to develop new catalysts using atomic layer deposition (ALD).”

“ALD is a three-dimensional thin film deposition technique that plays an important role in microelectronics manufacturing, in producing items such as central processing units, memory and hard drives. ALD offers exceptional control of nanometer features while depositing materials uniformly on large silicon wafers for high volume manufacturing. It is a key technique to produce powerful and small smart devices.” In Prague, Dr. Lei will be working with a longtime collaborator.

“My host is Dr. Štefan Vajda, who is the chair at the Department of Nanocatalysis. We have known each other for a long time and have collaborated on a number of projects. His expertise is in size-selected cluster deposition. He works with very fine nanoparticles on his end, and here at UAH we are working with thin films. By putting one on top of another, you can work down to the atomic scale. This process is important in producing catalysts with unique structures and properties.

“The catalysts we are developing in this lab [at UAH] are things like hydrocarbons used to do things like remove contamination from drinking water and for use as catalysts for energy conversion and biomass fuel storage. The catalysts have many applications. I will be there half a year, preparing samples here to combine our techniques and check for different chemical reactions to design the next generation of catalyst.”

Dr. Lei received his B.S. in chemical engineering from Nanjing University in China in 2004 and then pursued his Ph.D. in chemical engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He carried out part of his doctoral work – experimental studies of model catalysis in the aim to build precise structure-reactivity relationship – at the Fritz Haber Institute of Max Planck Society in Berlin, Germany. He visited Prague during this time.

After receiving his doctorate, Dr. Lei joined Energy Systems Division at Argonne National Laboratory as a postdoctoral researcher and then came to UAH as an assistant professor in 2013. His research interest covers the development of new techniques and processes for a wide variety of applications such as nanoelectronics, catalysts, batteries, solar cells, and other energy technologies.

Dr. Lei would like to see his UAH students benefit from studying abroad. He sees his Fulbright award as a chance to promote such opportunities.

“One of the goals when I applied was to improve my research expertise. One thing that could help would be to possibly establish an exchange program.”

The Fulbright Program, noted for its merit-based selection process and academic prestige, is the flagship international academic exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government. It has fostered mutual understanding between the U.S. and other countries since 1946. Fulbrighters from the U.S. and around the world have gone on to achieve distinction in government, science, the arts, business, philanthropy, and education.

Dr. Lei is the third Fulbright Scholar from UAH in the past three years. According to the Fulbright Scholar Directory at fulbrightscholars.org, he is UAH’s 20th faculty member to become a Fulbrighter, the first being H.E. Francis in 1970-71.

“I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time,” Dr. Lei says. “I hope to be able to live up to the high standards of achievement of the Fulbrighters, and I also hope to improve the outlook between Americans and citizens of the Czech Republic.”

Dr. Lei will spend six months in Prague and then will return to his lab at UAH and his post-Fulbright plans.

“I want to continue to expand on my work in atomic layer deposition to design and synthesize catalysts that will benefit the fields of energy and the environment, as well as optical and electronic properties.”