Chen receives Humboldt Award
Long-Qing Chen, Donald W. Hamer Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, professor of engineering science and mechanics, and professor of mathematics, Penn State, has been awarded a Humboldt Research Award by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany.
"The award is granted in recognition of a researcher's entire achievements to date, to academics whose fundamental discoveries, new theories or insights have had a significant impact on their own discipline and who are expected to continue producing cutting-edge achievements in the future," according to the foundation.
Chen was nominated by Jürgen Rödel, a member of the German National Academy of Science and Engineering and professor of materials science and engineering at the Technische Universität Darmstadt in Germany.
"It's such a great honor to be selected for the prestigious Humboldt Prize," said Chen. "I am grateful for the generosity of Professor Rödel for his time and effort in putting together the nomination package."
The Humboldt Research Award also seeks to foster international scientific collaboration and award winners are invited to spend a period of up to one year cooperating on a long-term research project with specialist colleagues at a research institution in Germany.
"I would like to use this opportunity to learn about the European culture, the German culture in particular, and their research environment, and to establish collaborations with prominent research groups in Germany," said Chen. "For example, I plan to work with Professor Rödel and his colleagues at Darmstadt on a number of problems of mutual interest including mechanical tuning of electric properties of ceramics, multiferroic thin films, phase change materials, and lead-free relaxor/semiconductor composites," said Chen.
Chen also plans to establish partnerships with other research groups in Germany.
"I am planning several short-term visits to more than half a dozen prominent laboratories around Germany, including Professor Rainer Waser's group at RWTH Aachen University, Professor Joachim Maier's group at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart and Dr. Dierk Raabe's group at the Max Planck Institute for Iron Research GmbH in Düsseldorf," said Chen. "I hope to learn about their research efforts on resistive switching, the mesoscale mechanisms of ionic conduction in solid electrolytes and interactions between phase transformations and plasticity. I also plan to visit several groups who are leaders in the phase-field method development including Ingo Steinbach's group at the University of Bohem."
Chen joined Penn State's 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 The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society. He also is a Fellow of the Materials Research Society, the American Physical Society, the American Ceramic Society and ASM International. He received the 2014 Materials Research Society Materials Theory Award, the 2011 TMS Electronic, Magnetic, and Photonic Materials Division Distinguished Scientist Award and the 2015 Lee Hsun Lecture Award from the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Shenyang Institute for Metals.
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 500 papers in the area of computational microstructure evolution and multiscale modeling of metallic alloys, oxides and thin films and energy materials. In 2005, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Chen earned a bachelor's degree from Zhejiang University, China; a master's degree from the State University of New York at Stony Brook; and a doctoral degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, all in materials science and engineering.
Every year, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation grants up to 100 Humboldt Research Awards to internationally renowned academics in all disciplines. The award is named after the late Prussian naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt.