UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – Penn State professor Long-Qing Chen recently received the 2022 FMD John Bardeen Award from the Minerals, Metals & Materials Society (TMS).
“I am truly honored and humbled to receive this prestigious award,” said Chen, Hamer Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, professor of engineering science and mechanics and professor of mathematics. “This award is special because it is associated with such a giant in science, John Bardeen, a two-time Nobel Prize winner in Physics.”
Named after Bardeen, the co-inventor of the transistor and co-developer of the theory of superconductivity, the annual award honors individuals for outstanding contributions and leadership in the field of electronic materials, according to the society.
TMS cited Chen for his pioneering and sustaining theoretical contributions to the understanding of domain structures and properties of electronic oxides.
“We received the award for a research area in which my students and postdocs and myself were totally new to the field when we started about 20 years ago,” Chen said. “So this is a research area that was initiated entirely at Penn State thanks to a lot of teaching and help from colleagues at Penn State and also outside of the University.”
For the past two decades, Chen’s group has been developing phase-field models for predicting the domain structures, or the unique properties, of ferroelectric materials, crystalline materials that exhibit spontaneous electrical polarization that can be switched by an external electric field.
“The body of work from our group helped establish the phase-field method as one of the mainstream computational methods for understanding and interpreting experimental measurements and observations of ferroelectric domain structures,” Chen said. “Our work provides guidance for experimental characterization for the discovery of new mesoscale domain states of ferroelectrics and for the synthesis and growth of ferroelectrics to achieve dramatically enhanced or novel properties.”
Chen joined the Penn State faculty in 1992 and has earned worldwide recognition and acclaim for his leadership in computational materials science. He is a Fellow and life member of TMS and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005. He is also a Fellow of the Materials Research Society, the American Physical Society, American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Ceramic Society, and ASM International. He received the 2014 Materials Research Society Materials Theory Award; the Humboldt Research Award; the American Ceramic Society Ross Coffin Purdy Award; the 2011 TMS Electronic, Magnetic, and Photonic Materials Division Distinguished Scientist Award; and the ASM International Silver Medal.
He is the editor-in-chief of npj Computational Materials, a Nature Partner Journal published by the Nature Publishing Group (now Nature Research under Springer-Nature). He has published more than 800 papers in the area of computational microstructure evolution and multiscale modeling of metallic alloys, oxides and thin films and energy materials and a textbook on Thermodynamic Equilibrium and Stability of Materials by Springer.
Chen earned a bachelor's degree from Zhejiang University, China; a master's degree from Stony Brook University; and a doctoral degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, all in materials science and engineering.