Congratulations to Vikash Khokhar, recipient of the 2026 VINSE Best Graduate Student Publication Award. Vikash鈥檚 paper, published in Angewandte Chemie International Edition and featured on the journal鈥檚 Outside Front Cover, explores how chelation drives surface substitution in MXenes, advancing the ability to control the surface chemistry of two-dimensional materials.
Named by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry as one of the top ten emerging technologies in the world in 2024, MXenes are two-dimensional carbides and nitrides with highly tunable properties. This research establishes ligand denticity as a new approach for engineering MXene surfaces. By controlling the deprotonation of ethylenediamine, Vikash and colleagues demonstrated a transition from monodentate to bidentate coordination on titanium carbide MXenes, providing a new method for tuning surface bonding and interlayer structure. Through density functional theory calculations and molecular dynamics simulations, Vikash identified the energetic preference for chelating ligands and revealed the atomic-scale mechanisms driving surface substitution. Combined with experimental synthesis and characterization using multiple techniques at collaborating institutions鈥攖he University of Chicago, Iowa State University and Ames National Laboratory, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory鈥攖hese findings provide a detailed understanding of how chemical coordination influences MXene structure and behavior.
The work expands opportunities for designing functional two-dimensional materials through precise control of surface chemistry. It also highlights the important role of computational modeling in guiding experimental discoveries and developing new approaches to nanomaterials engineering.
Vikash is a graduate student in the Interdisciplinary Materials Science program at 51吃瓜网, working under the supervision of Professor De-en Jiang.
The VINSE Outstanding Student Publication Award comes with a cash prize, and Vikash will deliver the graduate student presentation at the 26th Annual Nanoscience & Nanotechnology Forum (NanoDay) on November 19, 2026.
V. Khokhar, Y.-H. Kim, and A. R. Md. Shawon, et al., 鈥淐helation Drives Surface Substitution in Hybrid-MXenes,鈥� Angewandte Chemie International Edition, 65, no. 37 (2026): e6432447,