UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Zi-Kui Liu, the Corning Faculty Fellow in Materials Science and Engineering in the Penn State College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, will receive the 2026 Materials Theory Award from the Materials Research Society. Liu will receive his award and present a lecture, “The Quest for Predictability — Thermodynamics as a Foundation Across Scales and Domains,” as part of the Materials Research Society’s annual meeting from Nov. 29 to Dec. 4 in Boston.
The award recognizes advances made by materials theory researchers to the fundamental understanding of the structure and behavior of materials. Liu will be honored for his contributions to predicting the behavior of materials.
“I am deeply honored to receive this award and grateful to the many students, postdoctoral scholars, collaborators and colleagues who have contributed to this journey,” Liu said. “My research has been motivated by a simple question: How can we make the behavior of complex systems more predictable? Pursuing that question has led us to integrate concepts across quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics and thermodynamics. More recently, it has inspired us to explore broader connections among information, uncertainty, emergence, intelligence and science-based artificial intelligence. I believe these ideas can help advance predictive science not only for materials, but also for many complex systems across disciplines.”
Liu’s research has focused on developing computational and theoretical methods that accelerate materials discovery and design. In 2002, he coined the term “materials genome,” which focuses on the important building blocks of engineered materials, much like genomes in biology. He co-founded the U.S. National Science Foundation Center for Computational Materials Design in 2005 that helped establish computational thermodynamics-based frameworks that are now widely used in academia, industry and national laboratories.
Over the past decade, Liu has focused his research on building zentropy, a theoretical framework that uses many possible atomic configurations to describe materials, as well as ZENN, a thermodynamics-inspired, science-based AI framework for heterogeneous and multimodal data.
“Dr. Liu coined ‘materials genome’ nearly a quarter-century ago and has devoted his career toward realizing this vision of materials design at the intersection of physical and data sciences,” said John Mauro, interim John Leone Dean in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences and Dorothy Pate Enright Professor of Materials Science and Engineering. “Congratulations to Dr. Liu on receiving the Materials Theory Award for his pioneering work.”
A leader in computational materials design, Liu has published over 800 papers and advised over 35 doctoral students. In 2018, he was named distinguished professor of materials science and engineering at Penn State and in 2020 became the inaugural Dorothy Pate Enright Professor. In 2023, the Minerals, Metals & Materials Society held an honorary symposium recognizing his impact on computational materials science and materials design.
A fellow of both ASM International and Minerals, Metals and Materials Society (TMS), Liu served as vice president, president and immediate past president of ASM International from 2018 to 2021. His previous honors include the ASM J. Willard Gibbs Phase Equilibria Award, the TMS William Hume-Rothery Award and the American Ceramic Society’s Spriggs Phase Equilibria Award.
Liu received his bachelor’s degree in metallurgy from Central South University in China, his master’s degree in materials engineering from the University of Science and Technology Beijing, and his doctorate in physical metallurgy from the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden.