Long-Qing Chen

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 and Hamer Professor in 2015.

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 both undergraduate and graduate thermodynamics of materials.  He had previously taught graduate course in kinetics of materials processes,  advanced thermodynamics of microstructures. irreversible thermodynamics, 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 7 at the Gordon Research Conferences.  Professor Chen's current and former graduate students and postdocs have received more than 60 awards including Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering, Member of European Academy of Sciences and Arts, NSF Career Awards, American Ceramic Society Coble Award, IEEE Ferroelectric Young Investigator Award, Acta Materialia Best Student Paper Award, MRS Graduate Student Gold and Silver Medals, American Ceramic Society Graduate Excellence Awards, TMS Young Leader Awards, MRS postdoc awards, etc.

This faculty member is associated with the Penn State Intercollege Graduate Degree Program (IMATSE)  where a multitude of perspectives and cross-disciplinary collaboration within research is highly valued. Graduate students in the IMATSE may work with faculty members from across Penn State.