ZhiFeng Huang receives Career Development Chair Award

Associate Professor ZhiFeng Huang has received a 2014 Career Development Chair Award. Career Development Chair awards are awarded to as many as seven recently tenured faculty as part of the university's program to support the teaching and research endeavors of faculty members in the developmental stages of their scholarly careers. Since 1982, 217 university faculty members have held Career Development Chairs. The Career Development Chairs Award was established by generous grants to the Wayne State Fund and provide recipients with financial support, encouragement and recognition at a critical time in their careers.

Dr. Haung received his award at the WSU Academic Recognition Ceremony on April 24, 2014. According to the program, "Professor ZhiFeng Huang is developing a world-leading research effort focused on investigating the non-equilibrium and nonlinear phenomena in complex material and biomedical systems."

The broad topic of modeling complex material structures and nonlinear dynamic systems is of central relevance to many areas in physics, biomedicine, materials science and engineering, and applied mathematics. He has received the prestigious NSF Career Award and further external funding and support from NIH. With a coherent body of work that spans topics from epitaxy, grain boundary formation and evolution, superconductor physics, and the general dynamic theory of binary alloys, he has managed to open up new lines of research while connecting these ideas with the "classic" works.

Huang received the CLAS Excellence in Teaching Award in 2008 and he has been conducting important outreach activities to improve K-12 science education in the Detroit area. The Career Development Chair Award will allow Huang to further develop his research goals and objectives, work on new computational approaches, venture into two-dimensional materials and nanomaterial structure formation, and develop models for cell injury."