Kwabena Bediako has been selected to receive the Philomathia Prize for 2024. Bediako is an assistant professor of chemistry at Berkeley, faculty scientist in the Chemical Sciences Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and a member of the Kavli Energy NanoScience Institute. His research at the nexus of chemistry and physics invents and investigates novel two-dimensional materials with emergent quantum properties. Among other applications, this research holds important implications for renewable energy systems and powering our ubiquitous electronic devices.
Kwabena Bediako, an assistant professor of chemistry at Berkeley and the winner of the 2024 Philomathia Prize. Photo by Elena Zhukova.
The Philomathia Prize has been presented annually since 2022 to an early-career Berkeley faculty member, from any discipline, who demonstrates great distinction and promise in their academic field. The prize, established through a generous endowment gift from the Philomathia Foundation, comes with a monetary award of $200,000 for use at the awardee’s discretion over a three-year period. The award will be presented at a public Philomathia Day event on January 31, 2025.
“It’s a really prestigious award and such a great honor to receive it,” says Bediako. “What makes awards like the Philomathia Prize really impactful for a researcher at my career stage is that there’s a certain flexibility associated with how those funds can be used.” For Bediako, that means he can attempt high risk/high reward research projects that might otherwise face difficulty securing funding.
“Professor Bediako’s proposal stood out among many strong applications. His innovative exploration of novel materials, which could help solve urgent problems of climate and energy, make him a compelling recipient for this year’s award,” says Wilfred Chung, philanthropist and president of the Philomathia Foundation.
Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Department Chair F. Dean Toste says, “The Philomathia Prize seeks to identify individuals who have bold visions, the strength and talent to create new research fields, and the ability to push boundaries that can be transformative to our society. Kwabena Bediako is such an individual.”
“How do we make new materials or study known materials with properties that are fundamentally interesting but also could be technologically important?” — A motivating question for Bediako’s lab
Born and raised in Ghana, Bediako credits his high school chemistry teacher, Charles Karikari, with instilling the joy of studying fundamental chemical phenomena, as well as an appreciation for how some scientific discoveries eventually achieve societal impact. Bediako came to the United States for undergraduate study in Michigan at Calvin College (now Calvin University), where he had his first exposure to experimental research and found a particular passion for inorganic chemistry. After a year in industry working for Honeywell, Bediako resolved to pursue academic research.
Under doctoral advisor Daniel Nocera, Bediako earned his master’s from MIT and his Ph.D. from Harvard. For postdoctoral research with Phillip Kim at Harvard, he switched to condensed matter physics and studied the properties of low-dimensional nanoscale materials — an interest that has continued since he joined Berkeley in July 2018.
Bediako’s research group crafts innovative, multilayered crystalline structures and investigates their chemical and physical properties with diverse analytical methods. A motivating question for his lab, Bediako says, is “How do we make new materials or study known materials with properties that are fundamentally interesting but also could be technologically important?”
With his Philomathia Prize funding, Bediako will launch a new project to create an uncharted class of two-dimensional (2D) crystals possessing magnetic properties that can be electrically manipulated with little energy. Inventing magnetic crystals capable of electrostatic control could prove transformative for developing ultralow-power, highly energy-efficient electronics and computers that will be desperately needed.
Improvements in computing efficiency have so far kept pace with the explosive demand for internet-connected electronic devices and data services. In part, this is due to doubling every couple of years the number of transistors squeezed onto a computer chip. But a fast-approaching physical limit for silicon chip miniaturization, combined with accelerating global demand for electricity to power our devices, underscore the urgency to develop new materials for information and communication technology.
The Bediako Lab has established its expertise with moiré superlattices, which form from stacked and twisted atom-thin layers of 2D materials that can be modified to exhibit exotic physical and chemical capabilities. For the Philomathia Prize project, Bediako will supervise one or two graduate students in the design of such materials, specifically magnetic materials that can be controlled electrically. “There’s an element of risk to this project that we’re pursuing,” Bediako says, “but the goal would be to show that we can achieve this level of electrical control over magnetism with very, very low energy cost.”
The Philomathia Prize recipient alternates between a STEM discipline and a social sciences or humanities discipline. The previous two prize recipients were Markita Landry, associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, and Jennifer Redfearn, associate professor and director of the documentary program at Berkeley Journalism. The Philomathia Prize competition is open to tenure-track assistant professors and recently tenured associate professors. A committee of tenured Berkeley faculty selects the recipient. The honoree is expected to uphold the Philomathia Foundation’s vision of seeking innovative means to promote the betterment of humankind through a commitment to education and research. The nomination process for the next Philomathia Prize opens in October.
Dedicated to improving the human condition through the support of innovative individuals and ideas, the Philomathia Foundation has been a generous philanthropic partner with UC Berkeley for more than two decades. It has provided significant gifts to build the East Asian Library and Tien Center for East Asian Studies, to establish the Berkeley Energy and Climate Institute and the Advanced Bioimaging Center, and to support graduate student and postdoctoral fellows in the environmental sciences.
