The Lee Hsun Research Award winner, Prof. Yunzhi Wang from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering of the Ohio State University, USA, visited our Institute from July 2 to July 11.

Prof. Wang received the Lee Hsun Award at a ceremony hold by Prof. Huiming Cheng, the deputy director of the Institute in the morning of July 7th. After the ceremony, Prof. Wang delivered a lecture entitled: Multiscale Phase Field Modeling of Phase Transformation and Plastic Deformation. During his stay at IMR, Prof. Wang gave a lecture on modeling microstructural evolution in advanced structural materials to the graduate students, had individual discussions with professors and graduate students on a variety of research topics of mutual interest, and hold a round-table discussion with the management team at IMR on the administration of research institutes and graduate student education in the United States.

Prof. Wang graduated from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey with MS (1992) and Ph.D. (1995) in Materials Science and Engineering. He is well known for his fundamental and applied research in the field of computational materials modeling. He is at the forefront in the development and application of phase field modeling to phase transformations, interdiffusion, grain growth, sintering and dislocation processes in materials. The phase field approach has achieved increasing prominence in the field of computational materials science, and Prof. Wang has been one of the principal developers and practitioners of this technique. In his core research he develops and advances the method for new scientific and technical challenges, and through his collaborations he applies the method to specific materials systems, problems and applications. His innovative work includes: (a) integration of the phase field method with ab initio calculations, which has led to the development of microscopic phase-field methods of nanomechanics that opened a new avenue for the study of micro-mechanisms underlying microstructural evolution during phase transformations and plastic deformation from the electronic structure level, and (b) integration of the phase-field method with thermodynamic and mobility databases for the study of interdiffusion microstructure and diffusion path in multi-phase and multi-component systems. Prof. Wang has published over 80 technical papers (~60 refereed journal articles) with over 800 citations.