Dr. Zi-Kui Liu is a distinguished professor in the department of Materials Science and Engineering at The Pennsylvania State University. He obtained his BS from Central South University (China), MS from University of Science and Technology Beijing (China), PhD from Royal Institute of Technology (KTH, Sweden). He was a research associate at University of Wisconsin-Madison and a senior research scientist at Questek Innovation, LLC.
Dr. Liu has been at the Pennsylvania State University since 1999, the Editor-in-Chief of CALPHAD journal since 2001, and the President of CALPHAD, Inc. since 2013. He founded the NSF Center for Computational Materials Design and served its director from 2005 to 2014. Dr. Liu coined the name "Materials Genome®" in 2002 and his company, Materials Genome, Inc., owns its trademark. The name was used with consent in the Materials Genome Initiative; by the United States White House in June 2011.
Dr. Liu is a Fellow and VP-elect of ASM International and was a member of the TMS Board of Directors and a member of Board of Trustees of ASM International. He received the ASM J. Willard Gibbs Phase Equilibria Award, the TMS William Hume-Rothery Award, the ACers Spriggs Phase Equilibria Award, the Wilson Award for Excellence in Research from the Pennsylvania State University, and the Lee Hsun Award from Institute of Metals Research, Chinese Academy of Science.
Dr. Liu's current research activities are centered on first-principles calculations, modeling of thermodynamic, kinetic and other properties, and their integration in understanding defects, phase stability, and phase transformations, and designing and tailoring materials processing and properties. He has graduated 28 PhD students and published over 480 papers in peer-reviewed journals (Google Scholar, Web of Science). His group web site is at www.phases.psu.edu. He has co-authored a textbook on computational thermodynamics of materials published by Cambridge University Press , also available on Amazon.