January_AMP_Digital

A D V A N C E D M A T E R I A L S & P R O C E S S E S | J A N U A R Y 2 0 2 0 2 2 2019-2020 PRESIDENT OF ASM INTERNATIONAL ZI-KUI LIU John Ågren, FASM, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm Operating a TEMwith John Agren, circa 1990. AN ANECDOTE A meeting with Zi-Kui can be overwhelming to the unprepared. He is so energetic and has so many ideas that may be difficult to grasp. He speaks very quickly and half the syllables or even words are left for you to fill in. As an ex- ample, a group of us were having a scientific discussion and Zi-Kui, in his usu- al manner, spoke very enthusiastically and many times referred to “dead edge.” Obviously, this was an important thermodynamic concept we were unaware of. “What is this dead edge?” we asked. “Well, of course you know what it is, it is dead edge!” he responded. When we asked him to explain in detail, we finally un- derstood that he meant “Delta-H,” i.e., ∆H. I t is a great honor and pleasure for me to introduce the 2019-2020 president of ASM International, Professor Zi-Kui Liu, FASM, whom I have known for more than 30 years. For those of you who also know Zi-Kui, I think you will agree that he is a most dynamic and energet- ic person. He is a person with so many ideas and a clear vision of what can be achieved if we work hard enough. ACADEMIC AND SCIENTIFIC LIFE Zi-Kui is a distinguished professor of Materials Science and Engineering at The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State). He obtained his bachelor’s degree from Central South University, followed by his master’s degree from University of Science and Technology Beijing. Then he came to the Royal In- stitute of Technology (KTH) in Sweden as a doctorate student under my su- pervision. His wife Weiming Huang had been in our group for over a year with professor Mats Hillert as her supervisor. As you may imagine it was not an easy task to supervise such a dynamic and energetic person, but it was very excit- ing and rewarding. We had somany fan- tastic discussions! After completing his doctorate, he stayed at KTH for a cou- ple more years. During his time at KTH in Sweden, he also managed our elec- tron microscopy facility and obtained a docent degree. In 1996 the whole fam- ily, which included two boys by then, left for the U.S. After working a short period of time at the University of Wis- consin-Madison and at QuesTek Inno- vations LLC, he moved to Penn State in 1999 and was appointed as a full profes- sor there in 2006 and distinguished pro- fessor in 2018. Already during his Ph.D. study, which started as an experimental inves- tigation, Zi-Kui showed a remarkable talent for theoretical analysis of com- plex phenomena in materials. Later, at Penn State, he ventured into first-prin- ciples calculations based on the densi- ty functional theory (DFT). At that time most such calculations were on ther- modynamic properties, and Zi-Kui was one of the pioneers in using DFT to pre- dict kinetic properties related to diffu- sion including both activation barriers and prefactors. His team developed newmethods to predict other transport properties such as Seebeck coefficients of thermoelectric materials. As an example of Zi-Kui’s visionary ability, one may mention that he coined the term “Materials Genome” in 2002, almost a decade before U.S. President Obama announced the Materials Ge- nome initiative. Zi-Kui’s company, Mate- rials Genome Inc., owns its trademark. Zi-Kui drew inspiration from the Hu- man Genome Project and the CALPHAD modeling of individual phases to define the fundamental building blocks of ma- terials and implemented the concept in his multi-component and multi-scale framework of materials design and sim- ulation. He further extended the vision to the integration of academia, nation- al laboratories, and industries to accel- erate the development and deployment of computational materials science and engineering approaches. Zi-Kui initi- ated the concept of the NSF Industry/ University Collaborative Research Cen- ter for Computational Materials De- sign (CCMD) in 2003-2004 together with Georgia Institute of Technology before the acronym ICME had even been for- mulated. Zi-Kui directed the CCMD for its life span from 2005-2014. Zi-Kui has received many awards for his contributions to science and en- gineering, for example, the ASM J. Wil- lard Gibbs Phase Equilibria Award, the TMS William Hume-Rothery Award, the ACers Spriggs Phase Equilibria Award, and the IMR Lee Hsun Award.