I-wei Chen PhD

I-Wei Chen I-Wei Chen is Deputy Director of Penn’s Materials Research Center (LRSM) since 2009. He is best known for his work in ceramics with about 90 publications in the Journal of the American Ceramic Society. His thesis papers on stainless steel under Professor A.S. Argon are now textbook references for creep and fracture. In 1980’s he reported a series of in-situ HREM small particle experiments on zirconia, which established the mechanisms of nucleation and growth for martensitic transformations. He then introduced high pressure testing techniques to studies of zirconia ceramics; such work has constituted much of the basic understanding of transformation plasticity in ceramics. His research ranged from processing (powders, colloids, thin films, sintering, forming), structure (EXAFS, metal insulator transition), microstructure (grain growth, alloy design), properties (fracture, fatigue, plasticity, ferroelectrics, magnetoresistance, thermoelectrics) and new material design (superplastic ceramics, α-sialons, biomedical nanoparticles.) His current research in nanotechnology emphasizes thin film devices, magnetic resonance imaging and drug delivery. His 180 some journal papers have been cited over 7,000 times with an h-index of 50.