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. Jeffery Gibeling's lab, where he used the lab’s unique machinery to study creep deformation of high entropy alloys in a high-temperature, vacuum, and true-stress controlled environment. Mingwei then joined NCEM, LBNL as a postdoctoral researcher to develop his skills in state-of-the-art electron microscopy under the mentorship of Prof. Andrew Minor, the director of the center. His research at Berkeley was focused on the characterization of short-range order and the evolution of defect structures to elucidate the deformation mechanisms and origins of damage tolerance in high entropy alloys.

 

Paying it Forward

Mingwei plans to follow in his mentors’ footsteps by pursuing a career in academia as he is passionate for conducting scientific research and teaching. He looks forward to building a robust and ambitious research group at UC Davis. In addition to his advisor's unique experimental capabilities in high-temperature mechanical testing, Mingwei will acquire new equipment for metal manufacturing and processing as well as develop new techniques and methods to characterize materials on the atomic scale and analyze large experimental datasets. Though the combination of manufacturing, mechanical testing, advanced characterization and computer simulations, he aspires to build a platform to close the feedback loop for modern structural materials development with his colleagues and collaborators that share the same vision.