Kevin Daniels and Cheng Gong Promoted to Associate Professor with Tenure

ECE Faculty members Kevin Daniels and Cheng Gong have been promoted to the rank of associate professor with tenure. Their appointments were approved by University of Maryland President Darryll Pines.

Kevin Daniels joined ECE in 2017 and has joint appointments with the Institute for Research in Electronics and Applied Physics (IREAP) and the Robert E. Fischell Institute for Biomedical Devices. After receiving his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of South Carolina in 2014, he served as a National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. In 2022, Daniels was honored with the NSF Faculty Early Career Development Award for his proposal entitled “Real-time, selective gas sensing in complex gas compositions by molecular sieving via robust two-dimensional heterostructures.” Also in 2022, Daniels group's work was recognized as an Invention of the Year Finalist for their work on a novel biosensor capable of selectively detecting a single copy of SARS-CoV-2 in seconds.

His scientific contributions have led to over 40 publications and numerous presentations on 2D and wide bandgap semiconductor material synthesis, characterization, and applications.

Daniels' research interests include the growth and characterization of two-dimensional and thin film electronic materials and the fabrication of chemical and biological sensors, optoelectronics and spintronic devices.

Cheng Gong joined ECE in 2019 and has joint appointments with the Quantum Technology Center (QTC), Department of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE), and Quantum Materials Center (QMC) in the Department of Physics. Gong group’s research interests include 2D materials and devices, 2D magnetism and spintronics, energy-efficient nanoelectronics and quantum phenomena, with a total of more than $5M grant support from a number of federal and industrial funding agencies.

Prior to his position in ECE, he was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, where he pioneered the discovery of "2D magnet". He received his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Texas at Dallas in 2013.

He has been recognized with numerous awards, including 2024 NSF CAREER Award, the 2022 "Chemist of the Year" Award from the Maryland Section of the American Chemical Society, the Governor's Citation in 2022, and 2020 International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) Young Scientist Prize in Semiconductors. In 2022, he won the UMD "Invention of the Year" Award (both in Applied Physics category and across all disciplines) for his technological innovation entitled “2D Materials-Based Nanosensors for Rapid Monitoring of Meat Freshness”.

Published June 3, 2024