Prof. Dr. Long-Qing Chen

Humboldt Research Awardee

Age: 55

Area of research: Computational materials science of materials microstructures and properties

Name of my University / Research Institute: The Pennsylvania State University / Materials Research Institute and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering

Research period at the TU Darmstadt: April 1 to July 31, 2018

Prof. Dr. Long-Qing Chen.

My field of research is fascinating. To laymen I would explain it in the following comprehensible manner:

My research effort involves the development of theories and computational models for understanding, predicting, and designing the internal microstructures and properties of materials and how they will respond and spatially evolve with time upon changing temperature and pressure or applying external stimuli such as mechanical stress, electric field, or magnetic field, etc.

My most important success in research to date is…

My group has been developing a computational materials science method, called phase-field method, for modeling and predicting materials microstructure and property evolution for more than 25 years. In collaboration with several experimental groups, my recent contributions include the discovery of novel polar structural states in oxide heterostructures guided by phase-field simulations, the elucidation of the mesoscale mechanisms of mechanical writing of ferroelectric domains, the design and synthesis of a new ceramics with record high piezoelectricity in ceramics guided by phase-field simulations, and the computational design of a high-density magnetoresistive random access memory operating at ultralow voltage at room temperature.

Prof. Dr. Long-Qing Chen (in the right) with Prof. Dr. Jürgen Rödel (host) and Prof. Dr. Bai-Xiang Xu.
Prof. Dr. Long-Qing Chen (in the right) with Prof. Dr. Jürgen Rödel (host) and Prof. Dr. Bai-Xiang Xu.

I’ve chosen the TU Darmstadt because of…

the international reputations of the university, the research group of Professor Jürgen W. Rödel and many of his colleagues in the area of functional materials.

Questionnaire for the host

Guest of: Prof. Dr. Jürgen Rödel

Department: Materials and Earth Sciences

Our guest favorably impressed us by… his tremendous physical and mechanistic insight into material behavior, his ability to reduce reality to salient mechanisms and then to provide a complete simulation to predict material behavior.

Our team and the TU Darmstadt benefit from our guest’s ability… to quickly comprehend new material behavior and to interact with several research groups in the department and several topics at the same time.

Prof. Dr. Jürgen Rödel.
Prof. Dr. Jürgen Rödel.