Today, less than 3 percent of US electricity demand is filled by wind and solar. But what happens when the winds die down or the sun drops below the horizon? If we want to incorporate large amounts of renewable energy into our national energy grid, we need to be able to rely on a smooth, steady supply of electricity. The potential is out there: enough wind energy over land to supply our peak summer electricity demand eight times over enough concentrated solar power in the Southwest states to supply seven times our electrical energy needs. And in the transportation sector, the volatility of fuel prices and the desire to create a competitive domestic battery manufacturing industry have all led to rapid growth in research in advanced energy storage technologies. Grid reliability and the large capital costs of upgrading the nation's electrical transmission systems are sparking interest in distributed energy generation and storage. et al.New Materials Meet the Need for Better Batteries and Capacitors The increased deployment of renewable generation of energy, coupled with the high cost of managing peak grid demand, is driving interest in stationary energy storage technologies within the utilities industries. et al., Resonant Tunnel Diodes Built from Atomically Thin Materials Nat. Two-dimensional gallium nitride realized via graphene encapsulation Nature Materials 2016 15, (1166–1171) Realizing Large-Scale, Electronic-Grade Two-Dimensional Semiconductors. A Roadmap for Electronic Grade 2-Dimensional Materials. Unexpected Near-Infrared to Visible Nonlinear Optical Properties from 2-D Polar Metals. Scalable Low-Temperature Synthesis of Two-Dimensional Materials beyond Graphene. Atomically thin half-van der Waals metals enabled by confinement heteroepitaxy Nature Materials 2020 19 (6), 637-643 Light-Matter Interaction in Quantum Confined 2D Polar Metals Advanced Functional Materials 2021 31 (4), 2005977 et al Tunable Two-Dimensional Group-III Metal Alloys Advanced Materials 2021 Robinson and his research group, visit his research website! Robinson is super proud of his research group members – they are the ones that enable all the success! To learn more about Prof.
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Robinson has published > 250 research articles (see Google Scholar for up-to-date info), presented >150 invited talks, and has garnered a variety of honors and awards. His group focuses on a vertically integrated approach to making and understanding 2D materials grown via chemical vapor deposition, and they developed a new process to stabilize traditionally 3D materials in 2D form, dubbed confinement heteroepitaxy (CHet). Robinson is interested in process/property/performance relationships in 2D materials for a variety of applications, including high-frequency electronics, quantum computing, quantum communications, chemical/biological sensing, catalysis and energy storage, and beyond silicon CMOS applications. In July 2015, he co-founded the NSF I/UCRC Center for Atomically Thin Multifunctional Coatings (ATOMIC), and in 2016 he became the Director of User Programs for the NSF-funded 2D Crystal Consortium.
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He co-founded the Center for Two-Dimensional and Layered Materials in 2013, and currently serves as Associate Director of the Center. Robinson joined MatSE in 2012 as an Assistant professor, promoted to Assoc.
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Following a Post-doctoral fellowship at the Naval Research Lab, he returned to Penn State as a research professor in the Applied Research Laboratory in 2007.
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in Physics from Towson University in 2001, and PhD from Penn State in 2005. Robinson is a professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University with a focus on the synthesis and properties of 2D materials.