At Nanjing Tech University, we are fortunate to have an unsurpassed scholar and teacher, who sows the seeds of imagination in student minds to inspire them to think, associate, and brainstorm; who plants the seeds of creativity in students’ hearts to do valuable scientific research; who waters the seeds of the resilience of the students to practice and be self-confident. He is Prof. Huo Fengwei from the Institute of Advanced Materials, one of the “Top Ten Teachers of Virtues” of Nanjing Tech University.
Bringing “Imagination” into Experiments and Teaching Students to Learn in Life
In the weekly seminars of the academic group, students are always inspired by Prof. HUO’s insights during solemn presentations. During the discussion of the nano/micro-reactors, Prof. Huo introduced the phenomenon of “cows eating grass”: The inside of a cow is like a nano/micro-reaction factory, turning cheap grass into high-value milk. Moreover, the idea that the buildings in the city are like nano/micro-reactors is enlightening as well. The buildings integrate and cooperate with each other to make the city orderly. What would happen if the design process could skilfully operate thousands of reactions while ensuring orderly collaboration between them? In asking rhetorical questions over and over again, the students are also taken into a broader world of research.
Can we find the appropriate geographical environment and inject the right catalysts to promote oil production? Can nanomaterials play their role in artificial rainfall? Prof. Huo often instructs his students to exploit ideas and stay curious. To this end, he organizes joint seminars with top universities in China, such as Tsinghua University and Tianjin University, which provide opportunities for the students to enlighten their innovative thinking in the exchange of different research fields. Students who do follow the guidance of Prof. Huo also continue to surprise him. They have won Excellent Thesis for Graduate Students in Jiangsu Province and Excellent Thesis for Ph.D. Students in Nanjing Tech University, and First Prize in the Graduate Forum in Nanjing Tech University.
Bringing “Creativity” into the subjects and Teaching Students to do Valuable Research
In the past decades, Prof. Huo Fengwei has been working on composite materials and developing new functions by combining the advantages of different materials. He has achieved outstanding innovative research results in functionalized MOFs composites, NPs/MOFs catalytic systems, and functionalized MOFs films. In recent years, facing the cutting-edge technological innovation and the needs of social development, Prof. Huo, who has intellectual curiosity, has started to delve into the field of leather-based flexible electronics (tanning mechanism-based intelligent electronics).
“On the one hand, I like challenging work myself, and the cross discipline of fields is also conducive to the advancement of scientific research; on the other hand, I always wonder how to expand my scientific research to more widely meet the needs of society. Flexible technology has a wide range of needs in the fields of information, energy, medical care, and defense. If society needs it, we have to go into it,” Prof. HUO said. In 2014, Prof. HUO resigned from Nanyang Technological University to join the Institute of Advanced Materials at Nanjing Tech University. In the research of flexible electronics, he was inspired by animal skin and creatively applied leather to wearable devices, combining leather with the diversity and functionality of nanomaterials to re-empower leather with sensing capabilities, and proposed the concept of tanning mechanism-based intelligent electronics. After extended research, the wearable device of leather-based flexible electronics-tanning mechanism-based intelligent electronics has shown positive results in monitoring EMG, pulse, and ECG, and has shown potential application values in the smart steering wheels of cars and long-time health electrodes.
“The creation of science needs inspiration, which can be realized in crossover and connection, and scientific research should be creative, which is the only way to explore the future,” Prof. Huo said. Constantly meeting the needs of reality and unafraid to explore new directions, Prof. Huo’s creativity is bringing new solutions to problems in the field of health monitoring and giving new impetus to the growth and success of students.
