Jennifer Cano Wins 2025 Stony Brook Discovery Prize

Jennifer Cano, an associate professor in the College of Arts and Sciences Department of Physics and Astronomy, was named the winner of the 2025 Stony Brook Discovery Prize. Cano’s research, focused on developing energy-efficient materials to power electronic devices, could revolutionize the future of technology.

Established in 2013 through a generous donation from the Stony Brook Foundation’s Board of Trustees, the Discovery Prize celebrates bold, pioneering research with the potential to reshape scientific fields and tackle complex global challenges. The competition provides $200,000 award funding to early-career researchers in STEM disciplines whose visionary ideas may be too unconventional for traditional funding agencies.

The final round of the competition took place March 6 at the Charles B. Wang Center Theatre, where three finalists presented their research before a distinguished panel of judges. The presentations were prepared with guidance from the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science, helping to ensure that the finalists effectively conveyed the content and impact of their work.

Stony Brook University Interim President Richard L. McCormick opened the event by emphasizing the significance of the Discovery Prize in fostering groundbreaking research. “The Discovery Prize funds the kind of research that may be so revolutionary, so contrary to convention, that funding agencies are unlikely to provide support — research that takes us by surprise and changes the future of our world.”

Cano’s winning research proposal, “Theoretical Framework for the Discovery of Topological Moiré Materials,” concerns engineering quantum materials to realize novel phases of matter. It addresses a critical challenge in modern electronics, energy dissipation. “Phones, computers, and the networks that power them consume 10% of global energy, on par with the airline industry,” she explained.

The fundamental phases of matter are gas, liquid and solid. Within solids are metals and insulators, and within a quantum solid, there are even more possibilities. Cano’s work explores the creation of a ‘dissipationless wire,’ a material that allows electrons to move without energy loss. By leveraging stacked and twisted two-dimensional materials just one atom thick, Cano aims to design a revolutionary new class of energy-efficient conductors.

Existing superconductors achieve this but require extremely low temperatures, making them impractical, while Cano’s work provides a basis for discovering a room-temperature, dissipationless material, potentially revolutionizing energy-efficient electronics.

Cano expressed her gratitude for the award and funding. “I’m really excited to have won this prize. It’s going to be really impactful for my research group, and I’m incredibly thankful to the Research Foundation for sponsoring this award.” She thanked Nancy Moes and Radha Ganesan from the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science for their guidance in perfecting her presentation. 

The competition’s panel of judges included scientists Barry Barish, Nobel Laureate and President’s Distinguished Endowed Chair in Physics at Stony Brook; JoAnne Hewett, director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory and professor in Stony Brook’s Department of Physics and Astronomy and the C.N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics; and Shadi Sandvik, senior vice chancellor for research, innovation and economic development for the State University of New York.

Hewett highlighted the significance of Cano’s work, and what appealed to the judges about her proposal: “It was the approach to the problem, using the foundation she had developed to conduct a simulated search for materials, that impressed us as judges. The knowledge gained from this research can then be transferred to experimental studies to see if her projections hold true.”

President McCormick closed the event with a message of appreciation, “To all of the finalists, thank you for your curiosity, your continued brilliance, and your willingness to push boundaries. Your pursuit of compelling questions and your dedication to discovery are what make Stony Brook a center of scientific excellence.”

Learn more about this year’s finalists:

• Jennifer Cano, associate professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy: “Theoretical Framework for the Discovery of Topological Moiré Materials”
• Paolo Celli, assistant professor, Department of Civil Engineering: “Load-Bearing Enviro-Morphing Structures.”
• Yifan Zhou, assistant professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: “Revolutionizing Power Grid Computing Through Quantum-Driven Analytics.”

Past Discovery Prize Winners:

Chris Johnson, an associate professor in the College of Arts and Sciences Department of Chemistry, won in 2023 for his research on creating particles to manufacture clouds in order to temper the impact of climate change.

Eszter Boros, an assistant professor in the College of Arts and Sciences Department of Chemistry, won in 2021 for her research on developing new imaging agents and therapeutics for cancer applications.

Il Memming Park, an associate professor in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior in the College of Arts and Sciences and the Renaissance School of Medicine, won the prize in 2019 for his research on using neurotechnologies and machine learning methods to better understand the brain in unconscious states.

Thomas Allison, an associate professor with a joint appointment between the Department of Chemistry and Department of Physics and Astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences, won in 2017 for his research on how electrons move within molecules.

Laurie Krug, an associate professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology in the Renaissance School of Medicine, won the inaugural Discovery Prize in 2014 for her research on viruses associated with cancer and the idea of delivering molecular scissors to the site of virus infection using nanoparticles.

— Beth Squire