Rate My Professor Wanyi Nie

Wanyi Nie is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at the University at Buffalo, College of Arts and Sciences, a position she assumed in January 2024. She received her PhD in Physics from Wake Forest University between 2008 and 2012, with her doctoral thesis centered on the optimization of organic photovoltaic devices. Following her doctorate, Nie completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Texas A&M University and spent 11 years as a Staff Scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. There, she led a team developing hybrid perovskite materials for optoelectronic devices and explored novel low-dimensional hybrid materials for quantum material research. Her career trajectory reflects a sustained commitment to advancing materials science and physics at leading institutions.

Nie's research focuses on novel semiconductors, encompassing organo-metal halide perovskites, metal organic frameworks, organic semiconductors, and low band gap nanocrystals. Her work extends to opto-electronic device integrations, including light-emitting diodes, X-ray imaging devices, low-energy consuming computation devices, and infrared imaging systems. Additional areas of interest include spintronics, with emphasis on spin injection at interfaces and polarized photoemission, as well as photovoltaics for clean energy applications. At the University at Buffalo, her laboratory investigates semiconductor radiation detectors for photon counting and imaging, nanostructured semiconductors for light emitters, chiral semiconductors, and solution-grown photovoltaics. Nie has authored influential publications such as "High-efficiency solution-processed perovskite solar cells with millimeter-scale grains" (Science, 2015), "High-efficiency two-dimensional Ruddlesden–Popper perovskite solar cells" (Nature, 2016), and "Extremely efficient internal exciton dissociation through edge states in layered 2D perovskites" (Science, 2017). She contributes to the field as a member of the editorial board for APL Electronic Devices.