Rate My Professor Jun Lou

Jun Lou is the Karl F. Hasselmann Professor of Materials Science and NanoEngineering at Rice University. He earned a B.E. in Materials Science and Engineering from Tsinghua University in 1998, an M.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from The Ohio State University in 2000, and a Ph.D. from the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Aerospace Engineering and Princeton Materials Institute at Princeton University in 2004. He completed postdoctoral research at the Brown/GM collaborative research center at Brown University before joining the Rice University faculty.

Dr. Lou’s research focuses on nanomaterial synthesis, nanomechanical characterization, and nanodevice fabrication for energy, environmental, and biomedical applications, with emphasis on low-dimensional nanomaterials and their electrochemical and mechanical behaviors. He serves as site director for the NSF IUCRC Center for Atomically Thin Multifunctional Coatings (ATOMIC), as a member of the Rice Advanced Materials Institute steering committee, and as Rice Faculty Senator. He is Editor-in-Chief of Materials Today. In 2025, he was named an MRS Fellow by the Materials Research Society. He has also received the Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researcher designation in Materials Science (2019) and Cross-Field (2018), the Hamill IBB Innovations Award (2015), and the Charles Duncan, Jr. Award for Outstanding Academic Achievement (2015).