Zi-Kui Liu

Dr. Zi-Kui Liu is a professor of Materials Science and Engineering at The Pennsylvania State University. He obtained his BS from Central South University (China), MS from University of Science and Technology Beijing (China), PhD from Royal Institute of Technology (KTH, Sweden). He was a research associate at University of Wisconsin-Madison and a senior research scientist at Questek Innovation, LLC. He has been at the Pennsylvania State University since 1999, the Editor-in-Chief of CALPHAD journal since 2001, and the President of CALPHAD, Inc. since 2013. He founded the NSF Center for Computational Materials Design and served its director from 2005 to 2014. Dr. Liu coined the name “Materials Genome®” in 2002 and his company, Materials Genome, Inc., owns its trademark.

Dr. Liu is a Fellow and a member of Board of Trustees of ASM International and was a member of the TMS Board of Directors. He received the ASM J. Willard Gibbs Phase Equilibria Award, the TMS Brimacombe Medalist Award, the ACers Spriggs Phase Equilibria Award, the Lee Hsun Award from Chinese Academy of Science IMR, and the Wilson Award for Excellence in Research from the Pennsylvania State University. Dr. Liu’s current research activities are centered on first-principles calculations, modeling of thermodynamic and kinetic properties, and their integration in understanding defects, phase stability, and phase transformations, and designing and tailoring materials processing and properties. He has graduated 23 PhD students and published over 400 papers in peer-reviewed journals. His research group web site is at www.phases.psu.edu. He has recently written a textbook on Computational Thermodynamics of Materials available on Amazon.com.

Professor Liu directs a National Science Foundation Industry/University Cooperative Research Center for Computational Materials Design with support from national laboratories and manufacture companies in the United States, jointly with Georgia Institute of Technology. This center aims to educate the next generation of scientists and engineers with a broad, industrially relevant perspective on engineering research and practice.