Li Jing, a PhD student from City University of Hong Kong (CityU), received the 2016 Materials Research Society (MRS) Graduate Student Gold Award for her pioneering work on the development of next-generation thermal materials.

 

This is a prestigious international award for graduate students in the area of materials science and Li Jing is the first MRS Gold Medal winner from Hong Kong.

 

Li Jing’s research is focused on the design of bio-inspired surfaces for thermal management applications. She has made breakthroughs in exploiting structural morphology for the directional, long-range and spontaneous transport of liquid droplets under a wide spectrum of working conditions, ranging from the freezing to high temperatures.

 

The findings offer a new fundamental understanding of interfacial and transport phenomena, and will find potential applications in power generation, electronic cooling, cooling facilities of nuclear power plant and so on.

 

“It is very challenging to make new discoveries nowadays in my research area because it is a very traditional but essentially important area. Fortunately, learning from nature provides me with new insight and new concepts. For instance, inspired by the spore ejection process in mushrooms, we designed gradient surfaces to enhance heat transfer performance,” she said.

 

Li Jing has published one article in Nature Physics, as the first author and two papers in Nature Communications as co-author.

 

She received her award in the 2016 MRS Fall Meeting and Exhibit in the US. Over 6,000 researchers from around the world attended this multidisciplinary conference.

 

“The award truly exemplifies the research excellence and global impact of CityU. I have been most impressed by her deep dedication and love for research and scholarship,” said Dr Wang Zuankai, Associate Professor from the Department of Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering and Li Jing’s supervisor.

 

Since the establishment of the award in 2001, only two winners have come from Hong Kong and both are from CityU. Last year, Liu Yahua, another CityU PhD student supervised by Dr Wang, received the MRS Graduate Student Silver Award.

 

The MRS Graduate Student Awards are intended to honour and encourage graduate students whose academic achievements and current materials research display a high level of excellence.

 

With almost 16,000 materials researchers from academia, industry and government as its members, MRS is a recognised leader in the advancement of interdisciplinary materials research. Headquartered in the US, MRS has members in over 90 countries.