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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 3 President Liu at the ASM awards dinner in Portland in October 2019. PROFESSIONAL SERVICE Zi-Kui became very active in orga- nizing scientific meetings, conferences, and research consortia in his early days. He worked with the leadership of the international and Chinese CALPHAD communities to organize the CALPHAD conference in China in 1998. I remember how he launched the “Young Calphad- ians” meeting within a CALPHAD con- ference around 2000. The idea was that the newcomers should meet informally and start building up their network. Per- haps now that he is more established, the time has come to introduce a “Se- nior Calphadians meeting?” Neverthe- less, he has been the editor-in-chief of the CALPHAD journal since 2001, and president of the nonprofit foundation CALPHAD Inc. since 2013. Over the years, Zi-Kui has tire- lessly promoted computational mate- rials science and engineering and the integration of computation and exper- imentation through a broad range of professional activities. He taught com- putational short courses across the U.S. between 1996 and 2011, was one of the main initiators for annual sym- posia at TMS annual meetings on the topics of computational thermodynam- ics and kinetics and magnesium tech- nology in 2001, and MS&T conferences on phase stability and diffusion kinet- ics in 2006, and organized numerous symposia and conferences around the world. Zi-Kui joined ASM in 1997 and served on many technical committees as both member and chair for the ASM Alloy Phase Diagram Committee and on the TMS Board of Directors and the ASM Board of Trustees. He led the creation of new technical committees and societal scholarships and awards including the ASM J. Willard Gibbs Phase Equilibria Award, TMS Kaufman CALPHAD Schol- arship, and CALPHAD Larry Kaufman Scholarships. Together with his wife, he also established the Drs. Weiming Huang and Zi-Kui Liu Materials Genome Scholarship at Penn State. RESEARCH LIFE The focus of Zi-Kui’s research has been directed toward computational materials science. The CALPHAD meth- odology is an important part of and is now supported by DFT-based first-prin- ciples calculations and statistical me- chanics. He has applied computational approaches to a broad range of materi- als such as superconducting thin films, ferroelectrics, Ni-, Al-, and Mg-base al- loys, steels, bulk metallic glasses, and battery materials. He has published over 530 papers in peer-reviewed jour- nals and a textbook titled “Computa- tional Thermodynamics of Materials.” Zi-Kui realized that the work to build or revise CALPHAD databases is exceedingly laborious and subjective and needs to be automated as much as possible. This has led to the concept of Extensible Self-optimizing Phase Equi- libria Infrastructure (ESPEI) and its soft- ware development. His group further developed a Python-based thermody- namic computing engine, PyCalphad, which helped the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory win second place in the NASA Software of the Year competition in 2019. Subsequently, ESPEI has been redeveloped withmachine learning and uncertainty quantification using PyCal- phad. This becomes possible due to the large amount of property data predict- ed by DFT-based first-principles calcu- lations through their high throughput DFT tool kits (DFTTK). Furthermore, DFT-based calculations enabled them to predict critical points and positive or negative divergence of properties when the system approaches its critical point, such as negative thermal expansion in Invar alloys. EDUCATOR LIFE Zi-Kui Liu teaches thermodynam- ics of materials to graduate students and phase transformations to under- graduates at Penn State. He received the Faculty of the Year Award selected by students in the Department of Ma- terials Science and Engineering, and the Wilson Award for Excellence in Re- search, and the Faculty Mentoring Award at Penn State. Zi-Kui motivates people around him through his theo- ry that connects thermodynamics-ki- netics-crystallography (TKC) concepts with goals, actions, and communication skills. He presented his TKC theory at the ASM Emerging Professional Sympo- sium at MS&T events, during ASM chap- ter visits, and visits around the world. Zi-Kui has graduated 29 Ph.D. stu- dents, 10 master’s degree students, and 23 bachelor’s degree students. I have met many of them at professional con- ferences both formally at presentations and informally at group dinners that Zi- Kui organizes with his current and pre- vious students and associates. I was at several such dinners and felt the great connections between him and the peo- ple he worked with. Zi-Kui and Weiming married in 1985. Their sons, Erik and David, were born in Sweden and obtained their bachelor’s degrees in chemical engi- neering and mathematics from the California Institute of Technology and Harvard University, respectively. Erik also obtained his doctorate in chemi- cal engineering from the University of Washington. ~AM&P From le : Erik Liu, Zi-Kui Liu, Weiming Huang, and David Liu on a cruise in 2018.