About the Speaker

Zhang Xie, doctor of material science and assistant professor of the Division of Materials and Energy at Beijing Computational Science Research Center, obtained in 2015 his PhD from Max-Planck-Institut für Eisenforschung GmbH and Ruhr-Universität Bochum. After graduation, he served as a postdoctoral researcher at Max-Planck-Institut für Eisenforschung GmbH until the end of 2016. At the beginning of 2017, he joined Academician Chris G. Van de Walle’s team at the Department of Materials, University of California of Santa Barbara in the United States.

Zhang has been working at the Beijing Computational Science Research Center as an assistant professor since he returned to China under the Overseas High-Level Talent Recruitment Program in 2020 and his researches focus on the first-principles study of advanced structural and energy materials with emphasis on thermodynamics and kinetics of defect, phase transformations and corrosion in advanced structural materials as well as calculation and design of high-performance energy materials. He has published dozens of papers in international first-class journals such as Nature Materials, Nature Communications, Science Advances, Physical Review Letters, Advanced Energy Materials, ACS Energy Letters and Acta Materialia. Zhang claimed the 2019 Early Career HPC Achievement Awards issued by National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) of the United States (Three young scientists have been chosen throughout the U.S. to receive the awards and Zhang was the only winner in the field of computational materials).

About the lecture

Colin Humphreys, a well-known professor of materials science at Cambridge University in the UK, once described defects in this way, "crystals are like people, it is the defects in them which tend to make them interesting!” "defect" is literally a negative word, on which the studies of both metal and semiconductor materials focus. We can control the macro properties of materials and design high-performance materials by studying the microstructure composed of various defects. This lecture will show you with specific examples the various roles defects play in materials, which can be either angels or demons. The critical point is that we should be able to understand, harness and utilize them from the micro perspective.