Thermodynamics in Liquids and Soft Materials

Lab Vision

The sustainable development of our society is facing global challenges in energy management, climate change, environment protection, information technology, and human health. I am interested in developing computational methods and theoretical models to solve fundamental problems in physical chemistry for energy, mass, and information applications. My research areas are focusing on thermal physics, soft materials, interfacial chemistry, nanotechnology, computational methods, and theoretical approaches. 
Climate change and sustainability are important ideas we need to emphasize in our research and education as we motivate the next generation of students and practitioners. I will use physical models, high performance computers, and new information technologies to look for innovative solutions from nature. Through rigorous research and interdisciplinary collaboration, I will develop new advanced biomaterials and nanotechnologies for a sustainable future.

Sustainable Biomaterials for Energy Management

Plastics are wildly used in our life. However, fossil fuel based polymers bring huge pollutions to the environment.  Developing biomaterials with advanced physical properties is very important to the sustainable chemical industry.

Accelerate  Materails Development using Artificial Intellegence

AI is a powerful tool to protein structure prediction & design, image analysis, and automotive driving. AI accelerated materials development for CO2 capture, water purification,  and biomedical delivery can improve environment and human health.

Polymers and Fluidics for Information Processing 

Data from our society is growing at an exponential speed, but the conventional silicon-based computing architecture is at its limit. Developing brain-like soft and fluidic information processing materials is strategically important for the future.

Funding Opportunities

My PhD research projects was supported by NSF and ARO at ND. My postdoctoral ACM research project was supported by NSF. In my plan, I will focus on applying fundings from NSF and DOE. I am also interested in making connections with NIH. My computational resources have been supported by XSEDE, ACCESS, CRC at ND, and Rockfish at JHU. I will mainly use internal computational resources and also apply for ACCESS GPU and CPU recourses .