Award
2019 NSF CAREER Award Winner
Department
Materials Science and Engineering
Awarded Project
What path did you take to get to this point in your career and research?
My career dreams evolved in the following sequence: scientist (grade 1), fashion designer (grade 6), office lady (grade 12). I heard about Materials Science and Engineering during my freshman year in Fudan University, China. At that time, I was actually thinking about transferring to electrical engineering. Then I took an introductory MSE course and was immediately drawn to it. The subject is so interesting and so important, I knew I would never want to change my major.
I then graduated with the highest cumulative GPA in a class of about 100 students and went to graduate school at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and later on did my postdoc at MIT, all in MSE. Throughout my research experience, starting from sophomore year, all of my advisers have been awesome beyond description. Not only did they teach me how to do research and support my career choices, but they also inspired me to always do good things in life and work.
For the specific research area that won the award: metal tribocorrosion is an emerging field, where our traditional strong metals become quite vulnerable when both stressed and corroded. So our goal is to redesign the metals so that they are more robust and reliable under extreme environments.
What impact do you hope your research will have?
I hope to make better metals for various industries, including the biomedical industry. I hope that 50 years later, a few of my papers are still being cited. I also hope some of the results and products can improve people’s lives.
What do you find most interesting about your field of engineering?
Materials science and engineering is a very interesting subject; it is a field that needs a lot of innovation but once successful, could have a huge impact for the technology revolution. I teach an undergraduate intro course to non-MSE majors and I am pleased that at the end of the semester, many change their opinion about MSE and become interested in the subject.
If you had one piece of advice to give students that aspire to pursue research and are just starting their journey, what would you share with them?
Never doubt women are good at or interested in STEM.