He is an expert in ultrafast spectroscopy and infrared spectroscopy, including near-field nano-imaging and spectroscopy. Mengkun received his Ph.D degree in the Department of Physics at Boston University in 2012. Before coming to Stony Brook he was postdoc at the Department of Physics at UC San Diego in Dmitri Basov's laboratory. His research interests include complex materials with strong electronic correlations and electron phonon coupling (superconductors, multiferroics, magnetoresistors, heavy-fermion actinide compounds) and metamaterials. He studies plasmons in graphene, polaritons in Boron Nitride, and the phase separations in vanadium dioxide thin films. He creates artificial composites by E-beam lithography, photolithography or stencil imprint techniques. He uses these metamaterials as mediators between light and matter to perturb and study the novel optical/THz responses of complex systems.