About

Deji Akinwande is a professor and holds the TCockrell Family Regents Chair in Engineering #8 at The University of Texas at Austin Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2009, where his research focused on the material science, device physics, and circuit applications of carbon nanotubes and graphene. His Master's research in Applied Physics at Case Western Reserve University pioneered the design and development of near-field microwave probe tips for nondestructive imaging and studies of materials. His research primarily concentrates on 2D materials and nanotechnology, with a focus on pioneering device innovations from laboratory research towards practical applications. Akinwande has been recognized as an IEEE Fellow and a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and has received numerous awards including the 2018 Fulbright Specialist Award, the 2017 Bessel-Humboldt Research Award, the U.S Presidential PECASE award, and the Gordon Moore Inventor Fellow award. His work on silicene has garnered media attention from Nature News, Time, and Forbes, and his invention of 2D memory, also known as atomristors, highlights his contributions to the field. His research on flexible 2D electronics has been featured among the 'best of 2012' by nanotechweb news and has been highlighted by MIT's Technology Review. He is actively involved in the academic community as a distinguished lecturer, an editor for prominent scientific journals, and a co-Chair of the Gordon Research Conference on 2D electronics.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Nanotechnology
• Materials science
• Optoelectronics
• Engineering
• Electronic engineering
• Electrical engineering
• Artificial Intelligence
• Condensed matter physics
• Engineering physics
• Medicine
• Risk analysis (engineering)
• Composite material
• Computer hardware
• Physical chemistry
• Biomedical engineering
• Systems engineering
• Computer network
• Data science
• Business
• Cardiology
• Physics
• Biology
• Telecommunications

Selected publications

• Peer Review and AI: Your (Human) Opinion Is What Matters

  ACS Nano · 2026-01-22 · 2 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• 3.2 A Near-Field RF Reflection Transceiver ASIC for Continuous Unobtrusive Blood Pressure Monitoring

  2026-02-15

  article

  This work presents continuous, unobtrusive, and clinically accurate BP monitoring in a fully wearable form factor using an near-field RF reflection TRx ASIC in 65 nm CMOS. The NRR approach enables noncontact monitoring with comfort and long-term wear. The optimized TRx achieves 98.6 nV<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">RMS</inf> IRN, while SAR-based DC-offset cancellation and closed-loop phase calibration mitigate Rx leakage and phase error for clinical accuracy. The ASIC is thoroughly validated in human studies achieving accurate BP extraction within 6mmHg mean absolute error.

  PublisherDOI

• Room-Temperature Pulsed Laser Deposition of Boron Nitride for Enhanced Fuel Cell Selectivity

  ACS Nano · 2025-12-25

  articleSenior authorCorresponding

  Hydrogen fuel cells based on proton exchange membrane (PEM) technology are promising as an alternative to fossil fuel-based energy. However, current membrane technology suffers from hydrogen crossover, which represents a significant loss of efficiency. In this work, we demonstrate a scalable, room-temperature coating of ultrathin, polycrystalline boron nitride (BN) via pulsed laser deposition (PLD) that simultaneously increases the conductivity of perfluorosulfonic acid (PFSA)-based membranes while decreasing the crossover, retaining hydrogen on the anode. BN-coated membranes show a 20% increase in beginning of life performance at the operational conditions (1.485 A/cm2 at 0.6 V) and a 20% increase in power density (0.965 W/cm2) while exhibiting a maximum crossover current decrease of 32% (3.58 mA/cm2) relative to industry standard Nafion NR-211. The room-temperature direct deposition of ultrathin boron nitride with the PLD method onto a polymer membrane stands as a significant improvement to traditional 2D material transfer-based methods. These observations are practically relevant for the development of PEM technology by enabling more scalable and cost-effective high-performance fuel cell stacks.

  PublisherDOI

• Understanding and predicting trends in adsorption energetics on monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides

  Research Square · 2025-03-03 · 2 citations

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• On-chip atomristors

  Materials Science and Engineering R Reports · 2025-05-08 · 13 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Origin of large variations of current on/off ratio and switching voltage in atomically thin memristors: an exascale ab initio transport study

  npj 2D Materials and Applications · 2025-11-13

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Nonvolatile resistive switching in two-dimensional monolayers opens a new avenue for high-density memory/computing devices. However, questions remain as to why the current on/off ratio and switching voltage vary significantly among different devices. Here, we simulate electronic transport of large systems consisting of a h-BN monolayer sandwiched by gold electrodes, enabled by an implementation of the nonequilibrium Green’s function method in the exascale density functional theory (DFT) code: Real-space MultiGrid. Systematic calculations reveal that the wide range of on/off ratios is due to variations in interface distances between the electrode and h-BN that significantly modulate their wavefunction overlap. In addition, DFT calculations demonstrate that the energy barrier of a gold atom dissociating from the electrode to h-BN increases dramatically with the interface distance, thereby explaining the strong dependence of the switching voltage on distance. Our work demonstrates the significance of interface distance in governing the current on/off ratio and switching voltage.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Reconfigurable Antenna based on Solution-Processed MoS₂ Memristors

  2025-06-22

  article

  Toward next-generation communication systems, the importance of high-frequency and low-power operating switches has significantly increased for controlling RF circuits [1–5]. Unlike conventional RF switches, devices based on the non-volatile resistive switching (NVRS) of 2D materials have gained attention for their high cutoff frequency ($f_{\mathrm{co}}=1 / 2 \pi R_{\mathrm{ON}} C_{\mathrm{OFF}}$) in the terahertz range origin from low $C_{\text {off }}$ and $R_{\text {on }}[4,6]$. Nevertheless, bottlenecks such as poor uniformity, low reliability, and lack of waferscale fabrication have impeded practical application. To overcome these limitations, we used solution-processed MoS<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</inf>, resulting in large-area fabrication, 600 cycles of endurance, and 25% of device-to-device (D2D) uniformity. Furthermore, using $\mathrm{Au} / \mathrm{Cu}$ electrodes for electrochemical metallization resulted in power-efficient switching in the sub-1 V region. Additionally, the solution-processed MoS<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</inf> RF switches are incorporated into the coplanar waveguide (CPW)-fed antenna to demonstrate frequency and pattern reconfigurability [7].

  PublisherDOI

• Defect-Aware Extreme Device Scaling Limits of 2D Memristive Technologies

  Research Square · 2025-08-04

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Effect of Electric Field on the Hysteresis and Switching Behavior of the MoS ₂ /Au(111) Heterojunction

  ACS Nano · 2025-10-29

  article

  It can be said that the interface is the device. A holistic understanding of interfacial interactions and electronic structure of 2D materials with electrodes is far from complete but is necessary for tailored electronic devices, including in memristors for neuromorphic computing. Here, we develop a computational protocol to study the hysteretic behavior and charge carrier transport mechanisms of the MoS2/Au(111) junction under applied electric fields using first-principles calculations. We show that even in the absence of defects, formation of conducting bridges, or significant atomic reconstruction, the pristine MoS2/Au(111) junction shows hysteresis in the induced polarization, the electron barrier heights, and the carrier transport. A primary finding from our calculations is the modulation of the Schottky barrier and electron tunneling barrier as a mechanism behind the resistive switching mechanism of the pristine MoS2/Au(111) junction. We also show that changes of interfacial dipole moments with an external electric field contribute to the memory effect by lowering the electron barriers. Our results indicate that in the absence of defects, electric-field-induced relaxation of the interlayer spacing provides the means for spontaneous polarization. Based on this understanding of the MoS2/Au(111) junction, we propose that a back-to-back double Schottky barrier ferroelectric tunnel junction diode can be used to phenomenologically model the characteristics of the MoS2/Au(111) heterojunction. Our study has implications for revealing the physical origins of the onset of hysteretic properties of heterostructures based on low-dimensional materials, providing a more complete understanding of the mechanisms in resistive switching.

  PublisherDOI

• Enabling the Angstrom Era: 2D material-based multi-bridge-channel complementary field effect transistors

  npj 2D Materials and Applications · 2025-08-02 · 6 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  This review presents a strategic roadmap for integrating two-dimensional materials (2DMs) into multi-bridge channel (MBC) complementary field-effect transistors (CFETs). It highlights key integration challenges, essential design considerations, and industrialization strategies for 2DM-MBC CFETs. These advances are expected to enable ultra-small, energy-efficient, and high-performance devices in the Angstrom Era that transcend the scaling limitations of silicon technology, paving the way for innovative applications in artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), and edge computing.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• EAGER: Wafer Scalable Dry Transfer of Graphene onto Silicon Substrates

  NSF · $132k · 2014–2016

• CAREER: Integrated Si-CMOS and Graphene Heterogeneous Nanoelectronics

  NSF · $400k · 2012–2017

• Mechanistic and Device Studies of the New Observation of Non-Volatile Resistance Switching in Atomic Sheets

  NSF · $360k · 2018–2021

• 75th Device Research Conference (DRC) 2017. To Be Held at The University of Notre Dame, from June 25 to June 28, 2017.

  NSF · $10k · 2017–2017

• EAGER: Coupled Opto-Electro-Mechanics in Semiconducting Phosphorene

  NSF · $120k · 2016–2018

Frequent coauthors

• Jung‐Fu Lin

  73 shared

• Joon‐Seok Kim

  The University of Texas at Austin

  72 shared

• Li Tao

  67 shared

• Abhishek K. Singh

  Indian Institute of Science Bangalore

  57 shared

• Rinkle Juneja

  52 shared

• W. Pałosz

  Brimrose (United States)

  50 shared

• V. Swaminathan

  Rice University

  50 shared

• Nilesh P. Salke

  50 shared

Education

• PhD

  Stanford University

Awards & honors

• IEEE Fellow (2021)
• Fellow of the American Physical Society (2017)
• 2018 Fulbright Specialist Award
• 2017 Bessel-Humboldt Research Award
• U.S Presidential PECASE award by President Obama