Professional background
Huiling Duan received Ph.D. degree from Peking University in 2005 and worked at Cardiff University in 2005 and 2006 as the holder of Post-doctoral Fellowship of The Royal Society, London. Then, she was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship in 2006 and worked at Institute of Nanotechnology of Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe in Germany from 2006 to 2007. After that she took the Associate Professor position in Department of Mechanics and Engineering Science, College of Engineering, Peking University in December 2007, and got the National Outstanding Young Researcher Award of National Natural Science Foundation of China in 2012. In September 2013, she was appointed as the Chairman of Department of Mechanics and Engineering Science and Head of Solid Mechanics Division at Peking University. In 2014, she was awarded as “Cheung Kong Scholar” Chair Professor of the State Education Ministry of China, and took this position from January 2015.
Research interests
- Strain Engineering in Semiconductor materials and Semiconductor devices
- Fundamental problems in self-organization and applications to micro-organisms and nano-devices (e.g., physics of the interaction of objects, interfaces/surfaces, particles, molecules; self-organization of bacteria, nano-devices, etc.)
- Characterization and design of multi-functional materials, structures, composite cantilevers (e.g., biosensors) consisting of nanoporous materials (Au or Si) and solid substrate, taking into account the interaction among multi-physics phenomena across various length scales
- Growth, diffusion, morphological evolution and stability in stressed solids (e.g., growth of quantum dots)
- Mechanics of nanostructured materials and mechanical/physical phenomena related to surface/interface/interphase
Research experience
Research Fellowship of Baden-Württemberg State and Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship, at Institute of Nanotechnology, Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe, Germany.
- Composite cantilevers (e.g., biosensors) consisting of nanoporous materials (Au or Si) and solid substrate
- Fracture, brittle to ductile transition, and crack nucleation and evolution at microscale (e.g., the dealloying nanoporous Au)
- Growth, diffusion, morphological evolution and stability in stressed solids (e.g., growth of quantum dots)
- Mechanical/physical phenomena of nanostructured materials related to surface/interface stress
- Participated in a project “Functional nanoporous materials”
Post-doctoral Fellowship of Royal Society of London, at Cardiff University
- Strain analysis and growth mechanisms of quantum dots
- Thermal and electrical conductivity of heterogeneous materials
- Participated in a project “Nanostructured materials with unusual mechanical and physical properties”, sponsored by The Royal Society of London (as a principal investigator)
Research Assistant, Peking University, China (2001.09-2005.10)
- Thermal and electrical conductivity of heterogeneous materials
- Mechanics of nanostructured materials and mechanical/physical phenomena related to surface/interface/interphase
- Characterization of nanostructured materials and composites
- Participated in a key project of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NNSFC) on mechanical behaviour of blended/filled polymers (10032010), and another 3 NNSFC projects on micromechanics of heterogeneous materials (10072002; 10372004; 10525209)