Long-Qing Chen is Hamer Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics and Professor of Mathematics at the Pennsylvania State University.
Chen received his B.S. degree in Materials Science and Engineering from Zhejiang University in China in 1982. After spending one year as an assistant instructor at Zhejiang University, he came to the United States in 1983 and received his M.S. degree in Materials Science and Engineering from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1985 and a Ph.D. degree in Materials Science and Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1990. After a two-year post-doc appointment with Professor Armen G. Khachaturyanat Rutgers University, he joined the faculty at Penn State as an Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering in 1992. He was promoted to Associated Professor in 1998 and Professor in 2002. He was named Distinguished Professor in 2014.
Chen is the Director of US Department of Energy (DOE) CMS Center for Computational Mesoscale Materials Science (COMMS) since 2019 to advance the mesoscale science of quantum and functional materials and develop an open-source software (Q-POP) for discovering emerging mesoscale phenomena and understanding the formation and thermodynamic stability of mesoscale structures during structural and electronic phase transitions. He is the founding and current Editor-in-Chief since 2015 for npj Computational Materials published by Nature Portfolio with a focus on the design of materials through computation and machine learning and integrated computational and experimental research.
Professor Chen is currently teaching undergraduate thermodynamics of materials and a new gradaute course in advanced thermodynamics of microstructures. He had previously taught graduate course in kinetics of materials processes, thermodynamics of materials, and computational materials science at the continuum scale. Professor Chen's main research interest is developing multiscale computational models for predicting microstructure evolution in materials using a combination of atomistic/first-principles calculations and phase-field methods. In particular, he is interested in microstructure evolution during phase transformations, grain growth, Ostwald ripening, ferroelectric and multiferroic domain switching, coupled ionic/electronic transport in electrochemical systems, and coupled electronic and structural transitions in functional and quantum materials. His research group collaborates actively with numerous experimental groups, applied mathematicians, and other fellow computational materials scientists and physicists as well as with more than a dozen companies and national labs.
Chen has given more than 400 invited talks including 6 at the Gordon Research Conferences. Professor Chen's current and former graduate students and postdocs have received more than 60 awards including NSF Career award, Materials Research Society Graduate Student Gold and Silver Medal Awards, MRS Postdoc Award, American Ceramic Society Graduate Excellence in Materials Science Awards, Acta Materialia best student paper award, Penn State Materials Research Institute best Ph.D. thesis research award, TMS Young Leader Award, etc.
This faculty member is associated with the Penn State Intercollege Graduate Degree Program (IGDP) in Materials Science and Engineering (MatSE) where a multitude of perspectives and cross-disciplinary collaboration within research is highly valued. Graduate students in the IGDP in MatSE may work with faculty members from across Penn State.
Dr. Chen’s main research interest is in the fundamental understanding of the thermodynamics and kinetics of phase transformations and mesoscale microstructure evolution in bulk solid and thin films using computer simulations. Essentially all engineering materials contain certain types of microstructures, and our success of designing new materials is largely dependent on our ability to control them.
Microstructure is a general term that refers to a spatial distribution of structural features that can be phases of different compositions and/or crystal structures, or grains of different orientations, or domains of different structural variants, or domains of different electrical or magnetic polarization, as well as structural defects such as dislocations. It is the size, shape, and spatial arrangement of the local structural features that determine the physical properties of a material such as mechanical, electrical, magnetic and optical properties.
For the last decade, Dr. Chen’s group at Penn State is particularly active in developing phase-field models for microstructure evolution during various materials processes including grain growth, coherent precipitation, ferroelectric domain formation, particle coarsening, domain structure evolution in thin films, phase transformation in the presence of structural defects, and effect of stress on microstructure evolution. Current research focus is on the effect of stress/strain on ferroelectric phase transitions and domain structure evolution in ferroelectric and multiferroic thin films, domain structures in ferromagnetic shape memory alloys, electrode microstructure evolution in solid oxide fuel cells and batteries, precipitate microstructure evolution in Al-, Mg-, Ti- and Ni-alloys, strain-dominated morphological evolution, effect of defects such as dislocations on microstructure evolution, and morphological pattern formation during coupled electronic and structural phase transitions in functional and quantum materials.
Dr. Chen’s group collaborates extensively with experimentalists and with industry.
- Published over 800 authored or co-authored papers (Google Scholar: H-index = 127, Number of Citations ~ 70,000)
- 3 patents with 1 patent licensed by Intel
- 1 textbook on thermodynamics of materials by Springer Nature
- Co-edited 3 books in the area of computational materials science of microstructures and properties
- Inducted to 2023 Class of Academia Europaea (Foreign Member of Academy of Europe, MAE)
- 2022 TMS FMD John Bardeen Award which recognizes an individual who has made outstanding contributions and is a leader in the field of electronic materials
- 2018 – 2022 Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher in Cross-field
- 2021 Charles Hatchett Award for the best paper on the science and technology of niobium-based materials in 2021.
- 2021 The Paul F. Robertson Award for the Penn State EMS Breakthrough of the Year
- 2020 American Ceramic Society Ross Coffin Purdy Award for the most valuable contribution to ceramic technical literature published two years prior to the selection year
- Fellow of AAAS, 2018
- Visiting Chair Professor of Applied Physics at the Polytechnic University of Hong Kong (January 1- March 1, 2018)
- 2017 Humboldt Senior Scientist Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
- Fellow and life member of TMS (2017)
- Fellow of the American Ceramic Society (ACerS, 2015)
- DOE ORISE NETL Faculty Fellow 2015 – 2019
- 2015 Lee Hsun Award by the Shenyang Institute of Metals, Chinese Academy of Sciences
- National Science Foundation Special Research Creativity Award (2015)
- 2014 Materials Research Society (MRS) Materials Theory Award
- Fellow of MRS, 2013
- Fellow of ASM International (ASM, 2012)
- 2011 TMS EMPMD Distinguished Scientist/Engineer Award
- Students’ Choice Faculty of the Year Award, Materials Science and Engineering, Penn State (2010)
- D. B. Robinson Distinguished Lecture, University of Alberta (2010)
- Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS, 2008)
- Royal Society Kang Tong Po Visiting Professorship at Hong Kong Polytechnic University (2006)
- 2006 ASM Materials Science Research Silver Medal
- 2005 Distinguished Speaker, Hong Kong Society of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics
- 2005 Guggenheim Fellow from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation
- 2003 Penn State Faculty Scholar Medal in Engineering
- Deike Research Award from the Penn State College of Earth and Mineral Sciences (2001)
- 2000 Earth and Mineral Science College Wilson Award for Outstanding Research
- National Science Foundation Special Research Creativity Award (1998)
- Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award (1995)