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From microelectronics to cancer sensors: Nian Sun elected fellow of American Physical Society

Nian Sun has been elected a fellow of the American Physical Society for revolutionary work in magnetoelectric materials, used in everything from microelectronics to biomedical devices that can “smell” cancer.

Headshot of Nian Sun.
Nian Sun, distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering. Photo by Ruby Wallau/Northeastern University.

Nian Sun, a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northeastern University, is revolutionizing magnetoelectric materials, which are used in everything from microelectronics to biomedical devices that can “smell” cancer.

Now, Sun has been elected a fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), the largest association of physicists in the world.

The fellowship is recognizing Sun for “innovations in high magnetization materials, magnetoelastic and magnetoelectric thin film materials, microsystems, and device physics.”

“Antennas are everywhere,” Sun says, from tiny ones in our cellphones to those that are “meters tall” or even “miles across,” in the case of some low-frequency antennas used to communicate with submarines deep beneath the ocean.

Previously, giant antennas like these, which are “mounted on a mountain,” Sun notes, were needed to penetrate the thousands of feet of water that might separate a military submersible from its onshore commanders.

This also means that when a submarine is deeply submerged, it has no way of communicating with the above-the-water world.

“Our magnetoelectric antenna,” Sun says, can be produced to be “so small that it’s palm sized instead of miles across.”

This reduction “by several orders of magnitude,” Sun says, will also mean that, suddenly, submersible communication can be bidirectional. “That is, we can send signals from underwater to the shore and vice versa,” he says.

Breaking, as Sun calls it, the “water-air communication barrier.”

“That’s something that really is revolutionary,” he says. “I think that this will have a huge impact on a lot of things we work on.”

Sun’s team has also designed breath sensors capable of detecting diseases like cancer and Parkinson’s. 

“A little over 10 years ago,” Sun recalls that he heard a story on the radio during his daily commute that got him thinking. “An old lady,” he says, could “smell that her husband had a distinct odor — and it happened that her husband had Parkinson’s disease.”

This woman, Sun continues, “could smell other patients with Parkinson’s disease,” too.

This story took Sun down a path of research that led to biosensors capable of detecting coronavirus and even certain cancers.

Many cancer survivors, Sun says, are subjected to frequent low-dose x-rays and CT scans as part of a maintenance routine that they would rather avoid. 

Sun envisioned something that a survivor “could breathe into every day in the morning, and tell if her cancer” had reappeared, or if it remained in remission.

Kind of like a breathalyzer, but for cancer. 

But Sun isn’t stopping here. 

“There’s a tremendous challenge from the engineering side, how we can improve the energy efficiency of future computers,” he says. 

The energy requirements of advanced computing like artificial intelligence and quantum computers will be astronomical, “so this is something that we hope to make a difference for — our future microelectronics, future computers and making them more power efficient.”

In the world of biotechnology, Sun’s team is also part of a new center developing sensors “used for monitoring pathogen spillover from animals to humans,” to help predict the next pandemic, he says.

“Each year, no more than one half of one percent of the Society’s membership,” the APS website states, “are elected to the status of Fellow.”

The award “certainly means a lot — this is a recognition of our work in the community,” Sun concludes.