Xiaoli Tan

Xiaoli Tan is a Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, USA. He received his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2002 and B.E. in Metallic Materials from Xi’an Jiaotong University, China. He joined Iowa State University as an Assistant Professor in 2002, was promoted to Associate Professor in 2008 and reached the current rank in 2013.

Xiaoli Tan has been conducting research on the structure-property relationship in ferroelectric and piezoelectric ceramics for more than 20 years, with the electric field in-situ transmission electron microscopy technique as the main characterization tool. So far he has advised nine Ph.D. students and four M.S. students to graduation, supervised five postdocs and hosted nine international Ph.D. students. He has been involved in 30 research projects with a total of $10M in research funds, five of which are from NSF where he has served as the lead principal investigator. He has published 160 articles in refereed technical journals and has delivered 70 invited talks at universities and international conferences. He is the recipient of the NSF CAREER Award in 2004 and has been a senior member of IEEE since 2011.

Xiaoli Tan has been an active member of the American Ceramic Society since he was a Ph.D. student, and a committee member of the Electronics Division since 2007. He has co-organized nine symposia at MS&T and EMA meetings, ranked many applications to the Electronics Division scholarships, and reviewed numerous manuscripts for the Journal of the American Ceramic Society for which he has served as an Associate Editor since 2010.

Xiaoli Tan’s current research focuses on understanding the fatigue mechanisms in the form of domain evolution in lead-free piezoelectrics, observing the early breakdown nanoscale events in oxide dielectrics under extreme electric fields, and designing antiferroelectric ceramics with nearly zero electric hysteresis. His current research activities are sponsored by the U.S.-DOE and NSF.