About me

I’m a postdoctoral researcher in Prof. Giulia Galli’s group at the University of Chicago since Oct. 2018. My current research focus is on properties of defective oxides materials using first-principles calculations. I would like to develop a career in academia as a computational materials scientist.

It took me some time to find this goal. I received my B.S. degree in Applied Physics and M.S. degree in Optical Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, during which I was selected in the “4+4 dual-degree” exchange program to study two years of General Engineering at Ecole Centrale de Lyon in France. I found myself more interested in science, so I further pursued a Ph.D. degree in Materials Science and Engineering at University of California, Davis. This is also when I found my interest in computational modeling, and I transited from experiments to this area. My Ph.D. thesis focuses on understanding gas adsorption/transport properties in various nanoporous materials, and interface stability in oxides using atomistic simulations, co-advised by Prof. Roland Faller, Prof. Ricardo Castro and Prof. Pieter Stroeve.

As a postdoc right now, my main goal is to expand my computational techniques at the electronic-structures level, to eventually build a multi-scale simulation lab to understand various materials properties.