Meet the 22-year-old Chinese who tops Nature's 10 in 2018

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A 22-year-old Chinese scientist has topped Nature's annual list of top 10 people who mattered in 2018.

Cao Yuan, a young PhD student at MIT, has been recognized by Nature in a list unveiled on Tuesday for his two papers published this year on strange behavior in atom-thick layers of carbon. Nature said his findings "have spurred a new field of physics."

The young researcher found that graphene became an insulator when exposed to a small electric field and cooled to 1.7 degrees above absolute zero. And the graphene sheets became a super conductor with a slight tweak to the field. His findings have allowed physicists to explore possibilities in other twisted 2D materials.

According to the scientific journal, the Nature's 10 is its annual list of 10 people whose role in science may have had an important impact on the world. This year's image design for the ranking has its typical number "10" shaped as a variation of the graphene structure to represent "two graphene sheets offset by a ‘magic' angle," which is directly related to Cao's findings.

Cao Yuan is a PhD student at MIT. /Photo via MIT website

Cao's supervisor at MIT described him as "a tinkerer," as he loves to take things apart and rebuild them. He also loves to take pictures of the night sky with cameras and telescopes. According to his colleagues, the young scientist presented a shy manner and a spirit of persistence in pursuing his goals.

Cao graduated from the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, east China's Anhui province, at the age of 18 and then joined Pablo Jarillo-Herrero's group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the U.S.

He Jiankui, a Chinese scientist who claimed to have created gene-edited babies, is also on the list, but under the title of "CRISPR rogue."

Nature's 10 also includes paleogeneticist Viviane Slon, physicist Jess Wade, climatologist Valérie Masson-Delmotte, astronomer Anthony Brown, Malaysia's science and environment minister Bee Yin Yeo, genealogist Barbara Rae-Venter, bureaucrat Robert-Jan Smits and astronomer Makoto Yoshikawa.