Dr. Jing Yang awarded with Humboldt research fellowship
Yang will develop new corrosion-resistant magnesium alloys
Dr. Jing Yang is working as a postdoctoral researcher at MPIE since 2022. Now she was selected for a research fellowship by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for her excellent research on magnesium corrosion. The fellowship allows outstanding researchers a two-year stay at a German research institution of their choice. Thanks to her good experiences at MPIE, Yang chose to continue her work at the institute in the department “Computational Materials Design”: “I am really happy to continue my research at MPIE, where I will utilize our in-house developed Pyrion framework for simulations”, Yang explains.
Magnesium alloys are one of the lightest structural materials with great potentials in aerospace, automotive industry and as bio-implants. However, their poor corrosion resistance is what keeps them from widespread application. Despite many attempts to engineer the alloys microstructure, the best magnesium alloys are still inferior to elements like steel or aluminum: “To understand the metal dissolution process, I will model it in real time at the atomic scale. Something that only becomes possible by overcoming time -and spatial scale limitations of traditional methods. To solve this problem, I am aiming to develop a machine learning potential model, which allows us to overcome these limitations and simulate a longer spatial and time scale in an efficient yet accurate manner”, explains Yang. Before joining MPIE, she completed her PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA, and her postdoctoral studies at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland.
The Humboldt Foundation supports academic cooperation between outstanding scientists from abroad and in Germany. It grants these research fellowships to researchers who have excellent qualifications and their own research profile. As the awardee is free to choose any host institution in Germany, the prize counts as a great honour for both the awardee and the host institution.
