Dr. Long-Qing Chen is a distinguished leader in computational materials science and serves as the Donald W. Hamer Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Pennsylvania State University. He holds joint appointments as Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics and Professor of Mathematics, reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of his scholarly contributions. Dr. Chen earned his B.S. degree in Materials Science and Engineering from Zhejiang University in China in 1982, followed by an M.S. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1985, and completed his Ph.D. at MIT in 1990. After a postdoctoral appointment at Rutgers University, he joined Penn State as an Assistant Professor in 1992, progressing to Associate Professor in 1998, Professor in 2002, Distinguished Professor in 2014, and Hamer Professor in 2015.
Dr. Chen's pioneering work has fundamentally transformed computational materials science through his development and application of the phase-field method for simulating microstructure evolution across multiple scales. His research group has published over 500 articles, including more than 20 in Nature, Science, and Nature journals, with his work collectively cited over 106,000 times according to Google Scholar. As Director of the US Department of Energy's Center for Computational Mesoscale Materials Science since 2019, he leads the development of the open-source Q-POP software platform for discovering mesoscale phenomena in quantum and functional materials. His computational frameworks have enabled breakthrough understanding of structural and electronic phase transitions, ferroelectric materials, and microstructure evolution in metallic alloys and energy storage systems.
Beyond his research contributions, Dr. Chen shapes the global materials science community as founding Editor-in-Chief of npj Computational Materials, a prestigious Nature Portfolio journal dedicated to computational materials design and machine learning applications. His leadership extends to active collaborations with numerous experimental groups, applied mathematicians, and scientists at more than a dozen companies and national laboratories, demonstrating his commitment to integrated computational-experimental approaches. His exceptional contributions have been recognized with the Materials Research Society's Materials Theory Award, the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, and the TMS William Hume-Rothery Award, among numerous other honors. Dr. Chen continues to advance the frontiers of computational materials science through innovative research on quantum materials, mentorship of future scientists, and leadership in developing the next generation of computational tools for materials discovery.
