Mingwei Zhang Research Group

The U.S. Department of Energy, or DOE, has selected Mingwei Zhang, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at the University of California, Davis, as an awardee of its 2024 Early Career Research Program.

The award aims to support early-career faculty and researchers in making cutting-edge developments to solidify America's role as the driver of science and innovation around the world.

The pursuit of materials with exceptional mechanical properties at elevated temperatures is a constant endeavor in materials research that has recently become more urgent in our quests in space exploration, energy sustainability, and national defense. One such class of materials that has emerged as a promising candidate to serve under extremely high temperatures is refractory high entropy alloys (RHEAs), which represent complex mixtures of metallic elements with high melting points.

A UC Davis alumnus, Mingwei Zhang joins the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at UC Davis as a new faculty member after two years of postdoctoral research at the National Center for Electron Microscopy (NCEM), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). Mingwei Zhang's academic career is located in Northern California within an hour's drive on the I-80: Mingwei studied at UC Berkeley as a senior exchange student from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, followed by four years of grad school at UC Davis in Prof.