Bae selected as a Rising Star by Advanced Materials journal
The honor recognizes the work of early-stage independent researchers
Sang-Hoon Bae, assistant professor of mechanical engineering & materials science in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, has been selected as a Rising Star by Advanced Materials, one of the top journals in materials science.
Rising Stars are individually nominated by the Advanced Materials editorial team and editorial advisory board members in recognition of their potential to influence future directions in their respective fields of research in materials science. As part of the recognition, selected researchers are invited to publish a paper in the journal.
Bae’s research focuses on tackling the challenges in materials science with thermodynamics, kinetics and solid-state physics.
As part of this recognition, Bae highlighted his team’s recent work, led by Ji-Yun Moon, a visiting researcher, and Sanggeun Bae, a doctoral student, published Sept. 12 in Advanced Materials. This study solves a long-standing problem in making ultra-thin, high-quality single-crystal oxide nanomembranes for advanced electronics: They usually crack when lifted off their growth wafer due to built-in strain. The researchers created a special support layer called an elastically graded polymer, which gradually changes stiffness across its thickness and spreads out stress rather than concentrating it. This design allowed them to transfer large, wafer-scale, freestanding single-crystalline membranes without cracks, regardless of whether the film was under tension or compression.
The result is a much higher yield of usable single-crystal nanomembranes and a reliable path to building next-generation flexible electronics, sensors and photonic devices that rely on pristine, defect-free crystal layers.
Moon J-Y, Bae S, Ryu J, Kim S-I, Han S, Kim JS, Choi J, Kim S, Lee J-H, Choi S-G, Liu T-R, Ahn S, Seo J, Choi J-H, Kwun HJ, Shao Y-T, Km H-D, Park J-H, Lee J-W, Park J-W, Lee J-H, Ahn J-H, Bae S-H. Crack-Free Transfer of Wafer-Scale Freestanding Single-Crystalline Nanomembranes Enabled by Elastically Graded Polymer. Advanced Materials, Sept. 12, 2025. DOI: https://advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.202513080c
This work was partially supported by the National Science Foundation (FuSe-2329189) and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. (IO250310-12301-01). This work was also partly supported by National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (RS-2024-00408989, RS-2025-00516665, RS-2024-00452558, RS-2025-00563603, RS-2025-23323202, RS-2025-23323223); K-CHIPS (Korea Collaborative & High-tech Initiative for Prospective Semiconductor Research) (RS-2024-00399767) funded by the Ministry of Trade, Industry & Energy (MOTIE, Korea); T.-R.L. and Y.-T.S acknowledge support from the U.S. Department of Energy, Basic Energy Sciences, under award DE-SC0025423.
