News

Professor Guo-Xing Miao has won the En-Hui Yang Research and Innovation Award. The En-Hui Yang Award is bestowed annually to an outstanding researcher in the University of Waterloo’s Faculty of Engineering. 

Miao’s research focuses on the specific spin quantum properties in condensed matter platforms. The precise confinement, transport and manipulation of electrons and ions across nano materials and devices, enriched by their accompanied spin degrees of freedom, allows for advanced information processing in both the quantum and classic realms.  

His team synthesizes industrial level quantum materials such as complex spin systems, ion platforms, topological phases, and superconductors—to mass fabricate scalable, wafer-level devices. 

His innovation extends to a new company called SpinQ. Miao is one of the founders and science advisors of SpinQ. This company was founded in Waterloo, with all founding members deeply connected with the Institute for Quantum Computing. 

Professors Aiping Yu and Juewen Liu have been named to this year’s Highly Cited Researchers™ 2025 list recently published by Clarivate. The list highlights the world’s most influential researchers and scientists.

The exclusive list recognizes only researchers who have produced multiple Highly Cited Papers which rank in the top one per cent by citations in their field.

Professor Aiping Yu is a University Research Chair advancing next-generation energy storage by designing new nano-materials for metal-ion batteries. She uses thin, 2D materials, to make these batteries store more energy and deliver power with greater efficiency. As Director of the Applied Carbon Nanotechnology Laboratory, Yu works on improved ways to recycle batteries. Because lithium is becoming harder to obtain, her team is developing methods to recover lithium and other useful materials from old batteries.