My work sits between synthesis and metrology. I grow atomically thin carbon, then I measure it carefully enough to know whether it will actually do the job — and most of my published results come from the disagreement between those two halves.
I started in scanning probe microscopy at the Institute of Solid State Physics in Moscow, building carbon-nanotube probes because the commercial ones weren't sharp enough for what we wanted to see. That set a pattern. A few years later I was trying to pattern electrodes onto bacterial nanofilaments to measure charge transport along them, and conventional lithography destroyed every sample. So we developed a resist chemistry that doesn't — a chitosan-based, water-processable route that became a patent and a line of work on gentle patterning for delicate and bio-organic materials.
The same instinct carried into growth. Standard graphene CVD needs hydrogen and low pressure; we found an ambient-pressure Boudouard route that produces millimetre-scale crystals without either. Then at NUS the material changed but the question didn't. Monolayer amorphous carbon is a continuous random network of five-, six-, and seven-membered rings — no grain boundaries, because there are no grains. That structural disorder turns out to be a feature: it lowers the dielectric constant, it makes the surface lithiophilic, it binds to copper far better than graphene does, and it activates a basal plane that in graphene is inert.
Since 2022 that platform has moved from a curiosity to something semiconductor manufacturers run in their own fabs. I am part of the core experimental team on the NUS interconnect program, and I mentor the Ph.D. students who carry individual threads of it — several of whom are now joint first authors with me.