Welcome to my website.

The primary focus of my research has been on structural materials design via high performance mesoscale computational models, and exploring phase transition kinetics and structure-property relationship in energy conversion and storage, as well as other structural materials.

My first research interest lies in energy materials, whose performances are closed related to surface reaction kinetics. However, sluggish surface reaction significantly impacts the wide applications of renewable energy conversion and storage technologies. Traditionally, the chemical reaction, e.g. oxygen reduction reaction (ORR), in fuel cells can be improved through adding catalytic materials and modifying the 3D porous structures. For cathodes in Li-ion battery, Fe-site doping and adding electron conductive fillers are effective ways to tune the electrochemical reaction efficiency. But, it is still challenging to use solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) at lower temperatures or to obtain impressive cathode capacity of Li-ion battery at high-rates. Thus, my interests focus on quantitative understanding of Li intercalation kinetics and ORR affected by stress, diffusion and electrochemical/chemical reaction via high performance computational models. New strategies in electrode and cell design will be proposed.

My second interest concerns the development of predictive computational model to reveal novel structure-property relationship in structural materials, specifically in piezoelectric and multiferroic materials. This research aims at transforming theoretical models into practical and powerful tools for predicting and understanding complex structure-property relationships in advanced materials or systems, and for creating optimal designs. I specialize in tuning domain structures and optimizing piezoelectric responses via epitaxial strains in a variety of low-dimensional ferroelectrics and composite ferroelectric-ferromagntic materials. Besides, I am also interested in exploring the effects of charged mobile defects on fatigue and current leakage in ferroelectric capacitors.