Faculty Profile

Prof. Dr. Zhibo Zhang, Yanghua Distinguished Young Professor of Southwest Jiaotong University, holds a Ph.D. from the Technical University of Kaiserslautern, Germany, and was a visiting scholar at the University of California, Davis, USA. 

He serves as the Chief Scientist of a National Key R&D Program project. Previously, he held positions such as Deputy Director of the Foshan Industrial Technology Research Institute of the Guangdong Academy of Sciences, General Manager of the China-Belarus Industrial Technology Joint Innovation Center Co., Ltd., and Director of the Materials Computing Laboratory at the Institute of Materials and Processing of the Guangdong Academy of Sciences. His professional experience spans the entire chain of technological innovation and entrepreneurship, including basic research, technological innovation, sci-tech investment, enterprise incubation, and the integration of technology and finance. He has extensive international exchange and collaboration experience in countries and regions such as Germany, the United States, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Belarus.

He has led numerous projects, including the National Key R&D Program, the Youth Program of the National Natural Science Foundation of China, projects under the State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs, the Outstanding Youth Program of the Guangdong Academy of Sciences, the Guangdong Enterprise Science and Technology Commissioner Project, and sub-projects of the Guangdong Key Areas R&D Program on Materials Genome Engineering.

Leveraging artificial intelligence technology and multi-scale computational methods for materials science, he focuses on surface and interface issues in metallic materials, conducting interdisciplinary research in AI, multi-scale computing, and materials science. This work has yielded a series of research progress with distinctive features in processing, manufacturing, and application service. He has published 45 SCI papers in journals such as Nature Communications, Advanced Energy Materials, Advanced Functional Materials, Applied Surface Science, and Journal of Alloys and Compounds, including 28 as first or corresponding author. Additionally, he has applied for 19 national invention patents as the first inventor, with 7 authorized patents, 2 international PCT patents, and 5 software copyrights. Related patent technologies have been developed into online software deployed on the National Supercomputing Center in Guangzhou (Sun Yat-sen University) platform and applied in aluminum alloy casting enterprises, achieving remarkable results.

His research team welcomes undergraduates (sophomores and above), master's students, doctoral students, and postdoctoral researchers. Students aspiring to work at the intersection of materials science and digital intelligence are encouraged to join the team and work together to build a digital-intelligent world!