Xingbo Liu’s career path was revealed to him in the blink of an eye.
He was on a high school field trip to the Institute of Metal Research, about a mile from his home in Shenyang, northeastern China, when he peered through a transmission electron microscope (TEM) for the first time. “I remember seeing materials down to the atom scale and thinking, ‘That’s so cool.’ Then, I thought, ‘I want to do that,’” he recalled. “It was amazing to see something so tiny.”
It was little wonder that Liu was taken with the view through the TEM. With his father’s being a mechanical engineer and his mother a metallurgist, the lure of materials science was almost a genetic predisposition. His pursuit of “the cool” initially took him to the University of Science and Technology, Beijing, where he was ultimately drawn to research superalloys for jet engine turbines. “It was just really exciting for me to be able to help make something that could fly,” he said.
Now an assistant professor in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department at West Virginia University, Liu has turned his attention to something that he finds not only exciting, but also urgently needed—the development of sustainable sources of energy. Since joining TMS in 2002, he has worked diligently to “broaden awareness of new materials in new areas, such as renewable energy sources and fuel cells.” Currently the JOM advisor for the Energy Committee, Liu is also vice chair of the High Temperature Alloys Committee and was a founding member of the TMS Energy Conversion and Storage Committee. This year marks two new milestones in his TMS involvement. He is a lead symposium organizer for the first time at the TMS 2010 Annual Meeting, namely for Materials in Clean Power Systems V: Clean Coal-, Hydrogen Based-Technologies, Fuel Cells, and Materials for Energy Storage. And, he was named the 2010 TMS Early Career Faculty Fellow.

Read more in the February issue of JOM.