Stony Brook Graduate Student Wins Dr. Mow Shiah Lin Scholarship

STONY BROOK, NY - Yuan Sun, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Stony Brook University, was presented with the third annual Dr. Mow Shiah Lin Scholarship. The award ceremony was held on October 2nd where Ms. Sun presented a brief introduction of her research project titled "Highly Crystalline Rectangular Palladium Nanoparticles: Colloidal Synthesis and Electron Microscopy Studies."

Consisting of $1,000 and a plaque, the award was initiated by The Asian Pacific American Association at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) to commemorate the life and career of the distinguished late Brookhaven Lab scientist, after whom it is named.

In memory of Lin's distinguished research, achievements, and inventions, the scholarship is granted annually to an Asian immigrant with a student visa who is in pursuit of higher education with a purpose of making significant contributions to the environment and improving the lives for all humankind. The student should be matriculating toward a graduate degree at an accredited institution of higher education in Environmental Energy & Technology, Biology, or Chemistry, befitting the manner in which Dr. Lin began his career.

Mow Shiah Lin began his career at Brookhaven Lab in 1975 as a postdoctoral fellow, and he advanced to Senior Scientist and, ultimately, to Principal Investigator of a BNL team working with a Californian environmental remediation company to use selected bacteria to convert toxic oil wastes, such as oil spills and used motor oil, into useful products.  Dr. Lin owned 9 patents, published 85 papers, and won many national awards, including sharing the 2001 R&D 100 award to honor the top 100 technological achievements of the year. His career ended abruptly due to a brain aneurysm at the height of his career September 2003. He was posthumously nominated for the Lemelson, MIT life-time award. Dr. Lin is survived by his wife, Beth Y. Lin, a BNL Biology Associate with the Scanning Transmission Electron Microscope (STEM) group at the Biology Department; three daughters, Samantha, Lucinda, and Sophia; and two grandchildren, Josephine and Lee.

“I am greatly honored to receive this scholarship,” Sun said. “I admire Dr. Lin's achievements, and I'm inspired by them... I hope to achieve advances in nanotechnology that are beneficial for human beings and the environment.”

Yuan Sun earned a B.S. in chemistry and an M.S. in macromolecular science from Fudan University , Shanghai, in 1998 and 2001, respectively. Following she began her academic studies at Stony Brook where she earned an M.S. in Materials Science and Engineering in 2005. She has now advanced to candidacy to earn a PhD in the same field.

Sun's research is on the synthesis of metallic nanomaterials and their applications in hydrogen storage and fuel cells. Her earlier research has already yielded practical results. She holds a patent from China for a method to prepare highly oil-absorbent resin, and has filed for a U.S. patent for a method to synthesize platinum nanoparticles with applications in hydrogen storage and cancer treatment.

Pictured Above: Beth Y. Lin, widow of Mow Shiah Lin and co-coordinator of the Asian Pacific American Association, presents Stony Brook University student Yuan Sun with the 2007 Dr. Mow Shiah Lin Scholarship.