zhou lab
Zhou Lab advances nanoscience, nanoengineering, and precision measurement.
Rippled metamaterials with scale-dependent tailorable elasticity
Spider uses its web as an outsourced auditory sensor
Strong, lightweight, and flexible ceramic metamaterials.
Rippled metamaterials with scale-dependent tailorable elasticity
Our expertise spans mechanical, electrical, optical, and acoustical measurements, nanofabrication and characterization, and dynamic system design and modeling. Through fundamental innovations in bio-inspired engineering, nanomechanics, and system-level integration, we create new paradiagms of nanodevices and tools that enable access to previously unobservable phenomena. Our work advances precision sensing, control, and imaging, addressing societal challenges in health, information, and security.
We have PhD openings!
Interested candidates, please email jianzhou@binghamton.edu with your CV and transcripts.
News
2026/03/17 [Funding] Prof. Zhou, in collaboration with Prof. Ronald N. Miles, has received an S.H. Ho Foundation Research Grant to advance precision hearing diagnostics technologies. We gratefully acknowledge the Ho Foundation for its support.
2026/02/21 [Outreach] During National Engineers Week Community Day, our research group engaged over 200 visitors through hands-on sensing and control demonstrations featuring neuro-controlled robotic arm and toy car projects developed as part of senior design. We thank our student teams for their outstanding contributions.
2025/12/01 [Conference] Wei Sun, who conducted a year-long research visit at Argonne National Laboratory in 2025, presented a talk at the 189th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Honolulu, Hawaii. Prof. Zhou also delivered an invited talk at the meeting.
2025/03/20 [Paper] Our work titled "Rippled metamaterials with scale-dependent tailorable elasticity" has been published in PNAS. This collaborative study brought together researchers from Argonne, Penn State, Harvard, and Princeton.
​Highlighted by BingUNews: New research examines how nanoscopic ripples affect material properties.
2024/08/13 [Funding] Prof. Zhou, in collaboration with Prof. Changhong Ke, received a three-year NSF award of $574,999 to support their research on nano-opto-electro-mechanical systems (NOEMS).
2024/08/06 [Training] This summer, Wei and Xiangyu conducted their research at Argonne National Laboratory. We thank Dr. David Czaplewski at the Center for Nanoscale Materials for his mentorship in nanofabrication.
2024/04/18 [Award] Prof. Zhou was named a 'Career Champion,' nominated by students for his impact on their personal and professional growth.
2024/02/08 [Award] The collaborative work titled "Tiny Spies: Mosquito Antennae as Sensitive Sensors for Eavesdropping on Frog Calls" was awarded the 2023 Journal of Experimental Biology Outstanding Paper Prize.
2023/11/30 [Patent] BingUNews spotlights our latest patent that has now been commercialized by the Canadian venture firm TandemLaunch and its spin-off company Soundskrit: "Thinner than hair, stronger than steel — and able to hear? How spider silk research led to a new kind of microphone".
Soundskrit, a company founded on our 2017 invention "the bio-inspired flow microphone", has launched the industry's first high-performance, directional MEMS microphone.
2023/10/23 [Media] Our PNAS work "Outsourced hearing in an orb-weaving spider that uses its web as an auditory sensor" has been featured by Scientific American, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Cornell News, and Binghamton News.
2023/5/22 [Media] Dr. Zhou provides comments for National Geographic.
