Professor Wendy Mao (Stanford)

Title: "Under Pressure: Materials Chemistry at Extreme Conditions"

Abstract: The application of extreme environments (including variable pressure, temperature and irradiation) can induce dramatic changes in materials and give us a much broader field to discover new phases and explore novel phenomena. This has applications to a wide range of fields including Earth and planetary science, materials science, condensed matter physics, and solid-state chemistry. Improving our understanding of the modifications that occur at high pressure can also provide guidance for designing improved materials with desirable properties that can be utilized for energy-related applications. I will present some examples to demonstrate the range of new materials and properties which can be altered under extreme environments. In particular, I will focus on experimental work using high pressure as a powerful variable for tuning materials behavior.

Biography: Wendy Mao is a Professor and Department Chair in Earth and Planetary Sciences at Stanford University. She received her B.S. degree in Materials Science & Engineering from MIT, her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and was a J.R. Oppenheimer Post-doctoral Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Wendy’s research group works on understanding the behavior of materials under extreme conditions. Her team uses diamond anvil cells and laser-shock compression to access high pressure and variable temperatures and studies the dramatic changes that are induced using a suite of laboratory and synchrotron x-ray and x-ray free electron techniques. Her work has applications in understanding Earth and planetary interiors and developing new energy-related materials. Wendy has received the Rosalind Franklin Young Investigator Award and the Mineralogical Society of America Award, and is a fellow of the Geochemical Society, the European Association of Geochemistry, the American Geophysical Union, and the Mineralogical Society of America.