Lixin Sun

Lixin Sun is a Ph. D candidate in Department of Nuclear Science and Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is working as a research assistant with Prof. Bilge Yildiz in the Laboratory for Electrochemical Interfaces.

After she received her BS in Physics from Peking University in 2012, she started graduate studies at MIT, focusing on atomistic simulation of microstructures in solid ionic materials. She coauthored several papers on understanding atomistic mechanisms of transport and reactivity at microstructures, i.e. surfaces and dislocations, in the cathode and electrolyte materials for solid oxide fuel cells. In spring 2017, she received the silver graduate student award from the American Material Society.

Her research interest is to understand the impact of strain, atmosphere and temperature on material behavior via a combination of novel simulation modeling techniques. In particular, she is interested in the defect chemistry of solid state ionics materials at various local chemical, mechanical and thermal environments for highly efficient electrochemical energy conversion and storage, for example solid oxide fuel cells, electrolyzers, redox-based resistive memories and batteries. The simulation techniques she used include the density functional theory method and the classical force field method, as well as the embedding cluster method for simulating chemical reactions at microstructures and the autonomous basin climbing method for modeling material long time evolution.