2025 MRS Spring Meeting & Exhibit

Meeting Chairs

Qian Chen

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Qian Chen is an associate professor and Racheff Scholar in the Materials Science and Engineering Department at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). She obtained her PhD degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 2012 before starting her postdoctoral work there as supported by the Miller Fellowship. She joined the faculty of UIUC in 2015 and has received awards for the research in her group, including the Victor LaMer Award of the American Chemistry Society (2015), Forbes 30 under 30 Science List (2016), Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Program Award (2017), National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2018), Sloan Research Fellow (2018), Unilever Award from the American Chemistry Society (2018), and the Hanwha-TotalEnergies IUPAC Young Scientist Award (2022). The research in her group covers the broad scheme of imaging, understanding, and engineering soft materials at the nanoscale, including systems such as colloidal nanoparticles, energy storage materials, separation membranes, and lipid-protein assemblies, with an emphasis on electron microscopy and data science.

Sang Ouk Kim

Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

Sang Ouk Kim is the Chair Professor in the Department of Materials Science & Engineering at KAIST, South Korea. He is also serving as the director for the KAIST Institute for Nanocentury (KINC) and the National Creative Research Initiative (CRI) Center for Multi-Dimensional Directed Nanoscale Assembly. He received his BS, MS, and PhD degrees in the Department of Chemical Engineering at KAIST. After postdoctoral research experience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he joined the faculty of the Materials Science & Engineering at KAIST in 2004. His research interest focuses on the directed molecular assembly of nanoscale materials, such as block copolymers, 1D carbon nanotubes, 2D graphene, as a synthetic platform for discovering novel functional materials. He is one of the pioneers in developing the principle of directed self-assembly (DSA) of block copolymers, which has been considered in the international technology roadmap for semiconductor industry since 2010. His major scientific achievements also include the discovery of graphene oxide liquid crystals and single-atom catalysts, which are widely recognized as significant milestones for the graphene-based materials application to energy storage/conversion, wearable electronics & IoT, soft robotics, among other applications. Kim has published more than 280 scientific journal papers and delivered more than 450 invited presentations globally. He is also actively serving for the editorial tasks in more than 10 scientific journals, including Energy Storage Material, Small, Accounts of Materials Research, ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, Molecular Systems Design & Engineering, BMC Chemistry.


Dongsheng Li

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Dongsheng Li is a senior materials scientist in the Physical Sciences Division at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). Before joining PNNL, Li was a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Riverside. She holds a PhD degree in Materials Science and Engineering from Pennsylvania State University. Her research focuses on crystal nucleation and growth, materials synthesis and processing, and structure-function relationships. She frequently partners with the U.S. Department of Energy to explore crystal growth mechanisms via non-classical growth pathways to form branched nanowires. Specifically, using in situ transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and atomic force microscopy, her group has made many discoveries on particle-mediated growth, especially oriented attachment (OA) processes, solid-state phase transformation processes, and the resulting structure-function relationships. Li’s significant understanding of the kinetics and dynamics of OA processes in the iron oxyhydroxide system gives insight into further understanding and control of crystal growths via OA and resulting structures and properties. Li has given multiple special invited lectures at physics and materials conferences. Li is an active MRS Member and served as a symposium organizer. Li has also engaged in business, serving as an advisor to early career researchers.

Matthew Metz

Intel Corporation

Matthew Metz earned a PhD degree in inorganic chemistry from Northwestern University before joining Intel in 2002. He has since acquired over 300 patents supporting improvements in semiconductor devices. His focus at Intel has been on developing new materials to enable improved semiconductor device performance, with his first impacts being in the high-k and metal gate arenas. As the current director of the device materials team within Intel’s Components Research labs, Metz has led a team of materials and process expects to develop new materials and deposition techniques to drive the performance of Intel’s device, interconnect, and packaging programs. 

Samuel Stranks

University of Cambridge

Sam Stranks is Professor of Optoelectronics and Royal Society University Research Fellow in the Department of Chemical Engineering & Biotechnology at the University of Cambridge. He is also a Fellow of Clare College and an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and the Institute of Physics.

Sam completed his PhD degree at Oxford University, receiving the 2012 Institute of Physics Roy Thesis Prize. He held fellowships at Oxford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before establishing his research group, Strankslab, in Cambridge in 2017.

Sam's research focuses on the optical and electronic properties of emerging semiconductors including halide perovskites, carbon allotropes and organic semiconductors for low-cost electronics applications such as photovoltaics and lighting. 

His awards include the 2016 IUPAP Young Scientist in Semiconductor Physics Prize, the 2017 Early Career Prize from the European Physical Society, the 2018 Henry Moseley Award and Medal from the Institute of Physics, the 2019 Marlow Award from the Royal Society of Chemistry, the 2021 IEEE Stuart Wenham Award, the 2021 Leverhulme Prize in Physics, the 2021 EES Lectureship, and the 2022 Lem Prize. He has published over 200 papers and is a co-founder of both Swift Solar, a startup developing lightweight perovskite PV panels, and Sustain/Ed, a not-for-profit developing education for school-age children around climate change solutions. He is an associate editor at the AAAS journal  Science Advances, and sits on the editorial boards for the journals ACS Energy Letters and Advanced Energy Materials.