Award Announced at the 40th International Thermoelectrics Conference in Krakow, Poland

The International Thermoelectric Society (ITS) announced the 2024 Goldsmid Award for Excellence in Research in Thermoelectrics by a Graduate Student. The 2024 recipient is Xin Shi, a May 2024 Ph.D. physics graduate in the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics at the University of Houston. Shi’s advisor is Professor Zhifeng Ren, Paul C. W. Chu and May P. Chern Endowed Chair in Condensed Matter Physics and Director of the Texas Center for Superconductivity at the University of Houston.

The Goldsmid Award is the highest award given to graduates working on thermoelectrics. The honor is awarded once per year, with the winner selected from applicants around the globe. Nominees must be current Ph.D. candidate graduate students holding a master’s degree or equivalent who are actively engaged in theoretical, experimental, or device research in thermoelectrics. The award, initiated in 1999, carries a cash prize of US $1,000 and a certificate.

The award was announced on July 3, 2024, at the banquet of the 40th International Conference on Thermoelectrics (ICT 2024) in Krakow, Poland.

The 2024 Goldsmid Award committee, appointed by the ITS President, has the authority to appoint up to six other non-ITS Board members representing various geographical regions to form the selection panel. Members reviewed the nominations using rigorous criteria and chose Shi for the award.

Shi’s productivity during the 24 months preceding the conference led to his selection. Criteria for the nomination package included journal articles, presentations at local, national, and international meetings, invited seminars and colloquia, other recognition, and letters of reference.

Shi is no stranger to excellence. On May 12, he won the Dan E. Wells Outstanding Dissertation Award from the College of Natural Science and Mathematics, receiving a cash prize and certificate for his work entitled “Advancing Nontoxic, Antimony-based 1-2-2-type Thermoelectric Zintls.” He was also the lead author on a paper published on May 16 in the journal Science, where he and colleagues in the Ren group reported a new approach to predict the realization of band convergence in a series of materials. The method allows researchers to boost band convergence without a traditional time-consuming trial-and-error approach.

In a remarkable occurrence, Shi’s advisor, Dr. Zhifeng Ren, was awarded the 2024 ITS Outstanding Achievement in Thermoelectrics Award, which recognizes the highest achievement in scholarship and service to the thermoelectrics community.

When Shi was contacted, he said, “Besides feeling honored, I am elated that I have won my award in the same year as my mentor. This is the first time in ITS history that an advisor and his student have been honored.”

Shi took on a new position working as a postdoctoral fellow in Zhifeng Ren’s group at UH on June 1, 2024.

- Susan Butler, Texas Center for Superconductivity at UH