Professor Chen is currently teaching undergraduate thermodynamics of materials and a new gradaute course in advanced thermodynamics of microstructures. He had previously taught graduate course in kinetics of materials processes, thermodynamics of materials, and computational materials science at the continuum scale. Professor Chen's main research interest is developing multiscale computational models for predicting microstructure evolution in materials using a combination of atomistic/first-principles calculations and phase-field methods. In particular, he is interested in microstructure evolution during phase transformations, grain growth, Ostwald ripening, ferroelectric and multiferroic domain switching, coupled ionic/electronic transport in electrochemical systems, and coupled electronic and structural transitions in functional and quantum materials. His research group collaborates actively with numerous experimental groups, applied mathematicians, and other fellow computational materials scientists and physicists as well as with more than a dozen companies and national labs.
Chen has given more than 400 invited talks including 6 at the Gordon Research Conferences. Professor Chen's current and former graduate students and postdocs have received more than 60 awards including NSF Career award, Materials Research Society Graduate Student Gold and Silver Medal Awards, MRS Postdoc Award, American Ceramic Society Graduate Excellence in Materials Science Awards, Acta Materialia best student paper award, Penn State Materials Research Institute best Ph.D. thesis research award, TMS Young Leader Award, etc.