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What if the technologies of the future are built from materials we haven't even made yet? In this episode of No Reason to Get Excited (NRTGE), Dr. Aaron Winkler sits down with Lilia Xie, Assistant Professor of Chemistry and the Princeton Materials Institute at Princeton University, to explore the world of quantum materials, where the arrangement of atoms, the energy of electrons, and even the angle between atomic layers can transform a material from insulator to metal to superconductor.

Lilia takes Aaron on a wide-ranging tour through two-dimensional materials, transition metal dichalcogenides, moiré superlattices, and the frontier of molecular intercalation, where her lab is slipping organic molecules between layers of inorganic crystals to tune properties no periodic table combination could produce on its own. Along the way, they dig into how electrons flow through metals, why a crystal turned from red to black in her grad school lab, what unpaired electron spins have to do with your fridge magnet, and why sometimes the most surprising discoveries come from simply cooking up something new and watching what happens.

About the Guest

Lilia Xie is an Assistant Professor of Chemistry and the Princeton Materials Institute at Princeton University, where her lab develops emerging quantum materials for next-generation memory devices, quantum computers, and advanced electronics. She grew up in New Jersey and returned to Princeton as faculty after completing her undergraduate degree in chemistry there in 2014 (with certificates in Materials Science and Engineering and Musical Performance), earning her Ph.D. in Chemistry at MIT in 2020 under Prof. Mircea Dincă, where she explored electrically conductive metal-organic frameworks, and completing a postdoc at UC Berkeley with Prof. D. Kwabena Bediako as an Arnold O. Beckman Postdoctoral Fellow and L'Oreal USA for Women in Science Fellow, where she studied complex magnetism in intercalation compounds. Her lab works on low-dimensional inorganic materials and investigates how inserting molecular components between atomic layers can precisely tune electrical, magnetic, and optical properties.

Connect with Lilia

Xie Lab: https://liliaxie.chemistry.princeton.edu
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lilia-s-xie/
X / Twitter: https://x.com/lilia_xie

Chapters

00:00 – Cold Open: Quantum Materials and the Invisible Suit
02:00 – Meet Lilia Xie
02:40 – What Are Materials, Really?
03:45 – Inorganic Materials, Metals, and Quantum Properties
05:26 – Transition Metal Dichalcogenides: The MoS2 Family
08:35 – 2D Layers, Sandwiches, and Electron Delocalization
11:50 – Moiré Superlattices: A New Length Scale From a Twist
17:00 – How Electrons Know Their Environment Is Changing
24:32 – Orbitals, Energy States, and the Basics of Quantum Mechanics
33:28 – Tantalum Disulfide and the Three Buckets of Materials
37:38 – How Metals Conduct: A Continuum of Energy States
43:24 – What Lilia Is Actually After: Molecular Intercalation
51:10 – Molecules Between the Layers: Infinite Tunability
54:46 – Early Lab Life: Growing Crystals Without Answers Yet
1:05:44 – The Red Crystal That Turned Black
1:21:02 – Room Temperature Superconductivity and the Future of Computing
1:23:20 – Where Magnetism and Electricity Become the Same Thing

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Connect with Dr. Aaron Winkler

• Website: www.aaronwinklermd.com
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What if the most powerful materials of the future are only one atom thick? In this episode of No Reason to Get Excited (NRTGE), Dr. Aaron Winkler sits down with Fang Liu, Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University, to explore the cutting-edge world of two-dimensional materials, where single-atom-thick semiconductors stack, twist, and transform in ways that could redefine electronics, quantum computing, and energy technology.

From a childhood in Northeast China where she barely made it into chemistry at Peking University (the major with the lowest score threshold), to inventing a gold-based exfoliation technique that won her a faculty position at Stanford, Fang walks through how her lab creates moiré superlattices at centimeter scales, uses ultrafast lasers to make atomic lattices twist in trillionths of a second, and collaborates with Cornell and SLAC to watch quantum materials dance. Along the way, she and Aaron dig into why Scotch tape won a Nobel Prize, what lives between van der Waals forces and chemical bonds, why twisted bilayer graphene becomes a superconductor at exactly 1.1 degrees, and how sometimes the best career path is the one where you take the only offer you get.

About the Guest
Fang Liu is an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University, where her lab develops scalable methods for creating and studying two-dimensional materials and their artificial structures. She invented a gold-based exfoliation technique during her postdoctoral work at Columbia University that enables the production of large-scale, high-quality moiré superlattices, millimeters to centimeters in size, with nearly perfect yield. She received her B.S. in Chemistry from Peking University in Beijing in 2010, her Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania in 2015 (where she studied photochemistry of Criegee intermediates and atmospheric radicals under Prof. Marsha Lester), and was a DOE postdoctoral fellow in Prof. Xiaoyang Zhu's group at Columbia University from 2016 to 2020, where she switched fields from gas-phase spectroscopy to solid-state 2D materials. Her research uses ultrafast spectroscopy, electron diffraction, and light-induced control to explore quantum properties in twisted materials, with recent work (published in Nature in 2023) demonstrating photo-induced twisting motion in moiré superlattices. Before joining Stanford in 2020, she applied to 92 universities for faculty positions.

Connect with Fang
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fang-liu-b58ba717/

Chapters
00:00 – Cold Open: Invisibility Suits and Moiré Magic
01:19 – Meet Fang Liu
01:45 – Two-Dimensional Materials: Solids One Atom Thick
08:26 – Building Devices at the Atomic Scale
14:21 – How to Make a Monolayer: Top-Down vs Bottom-Up
17:39 – The Nobel Prize Technique: Scotch Tape Exfoliation
19:52 – Gold Exfoliation: A Better Way
23:31 – The Physics of Adhesion: Not Quite a Bond, Not Quite van der Waals
28:06 – Moiré Superlattices: When Two Layers Twist
35:18 – Scaling Up: Centimeter-Scale Structures
38:41 – Ultrafast Spectroscopy: Watching Atoms Move in Real Time
45:06 – Photo-Induced Twist: Light Makes Lattices Dance
52:38 – How She Got Into Chemistry: The Lowest Score Threshold
1:00:17 – Switching Fields and Landing at Stanford

If you enjoyed this episode of No Reason to Get Excited, make sure to follow the show, leave a rating or review, and share this episode with someone who loves deep conversations about science, physics, and the mysteries of the universe.

Connect with Dr. Aaron Winkler

• Website: www.aaronwinklermd.com
• LinkedIn: @NRTGEPOD
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What if curing a chronic disease looked less like a daily pill and more like a tiny, wireless implant of living cells that quietly produces your medicine on demand? In this episode of No Reason to Get Excited (NRTGE), Dr. Aaron Winkler sits down with Siddharth Krishnan, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, to explore the rapidly evolving frontier of bioelectronic medicine.

From his grandfather's soldering iron in Chennai, to a New Yorker article on John Rogers that changed his life, to a battery-free implant that has cured diabetes in mice for months, Siddharth walks through how his lab is engineering devices that combine living cells with thin-film electronics to deliver biologic drugs continuously, sense biomarkers in real time, and reshape what treatment for chronic disease can even look like. Along the way, he and Aaron dig into why oxygen is the hardest problem in implantable cell therapy, why the solution borrows physics from fuel cells, RFID credit cards, and photosynthesis, and why the future of medicine might involve all of us walking around with our own tiny bioreactors under the skin.

About the Guest
Siddharth Krishnan is an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University and a Terman Faculty Fellow, with a courtesy appointment in Bioengineering. His lab develops bioelectronic devices for sensing and therapeutics, with a particular focus on battery-free, wirelessly powered implants that combine inorganic electronics with living cells (so-called "living drug factories") to treat chronic diseases such as type 1 diabetes. He received his BS and MS degrees in mechanical engineering from Washington University in St. Louis, earned his PhD in materials science and engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the lab of Prof. John Rogers, and was a K99/R00 Research Scientist in the labs of Profs. Daniel Anderson and Robert Langer at the Koch Institute at MIT and Boston Children's Hospital before joining Stanford. He is also a co-founder of Rhaeos Inc., a medical device company translating his graduate work on wireless wearable diagnostic tools for neurological surgery, and has been recognized on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list and MIT Technology Review's Innovators Under 35.

Connect with Siddharth

https://siddharthrkrishnan.wordpress.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharth-krishnan-b2a79a8/

Chapters
00:00 – Cold Open: Wireless Power and Magnetic Fields

00:30 – Meet Siddharth Krishnan

01:08 – From Chennai to the Midwest

04:52 – The Light in Olin Library: From Humanities to Engineering

07:09 – A Grandfather, a Soldering Iron, and a Homemade Guitar Amp

10:47 – The New Yorker Article That Changed Everything

15:23 – Living Drug Factories: Engineering Cells Inside Implants

19:30 – Pancreatic Islets, Glucagon, and Type 1 Diabetes

24:24 – The Real Bottleneck: Solving the Oxygen Problem

27:38 – Borrowing Physics from Fuel Cells and Silicone Membranes

34:34 – Engineering Photosynthesis Inside the Body

36:18 – Wireless Power Harvesting and the RFID Trick

40:00 – Building a Bioelectronic Artificial Pancreas

46:44 – Why Life Stays Small Without Blood Supply

49:05 – From Drug Delivery to Living Biosensors

52:42 – Real-Time Inflammation Tracking and Long COVID

54:42 – Curing Mouse Diabetes for Months

If you enjoyed this episode of No Reason to Get Excited, make sure to follow the show, leave a rating or review, and share this episode with someone who loves deep conversations about science, physics, and the mysteries of the universe.

Connect with Dr. Aaron Winkler

• Website: www.aaronwinklermd.com
• LinkedIn: @NRTGEPOD
• Instagram @NRTGEPOD