Dickey receives NSF Career Award

Dr. Michael Dickey, assistant professor of chemical and bimolecular engineering at North Carolina State University, has received a Faculty Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The award start date is April 1, 2010, and it is estimated to last through March 31, 2015.

The award, known as the NSF Career Award, is one of the highest honors given by NSF to early-career faculty in science and engineering.

To date, NSF has committed $400,000 in funding to support Dickey’s research project entitled, “Understanding and Controlling the Surface Properties of a Micromoldable Liquid Metal.” The project involves research to identify the surface properties of a micromoldable liquid metal, a gallium-based fluid with a low viscosity at room temperature. It forms a thin, solid ‘skin’ of oxide that allows the metal to be micromolded into shapes such as wires and antennas that may be useful for flexible electronics.

The research will explore the fundamental properties of this surface and identify means of manipulating, modifying, and tuning it to form functional electronics with surface-dictated properties. For this project, new surface sensitive techniques will be developed and used to thoroughly characterize the unique properties of the skin of oxide on the liquid metal.

Dickey received his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin 2006. He did post-doc work in chemistry at Harvard University from 2006 to 2008.