Pengcheng Dai, professor of physics, has been named by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to its 2012 class of fellows.
This year, 702 members have been awarded this honor by AAAS because of their scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications Dai was recognized for his distinguished contributions to the understanding of the magnetic properties in copper and iron-based high temperature superconductors, heavy fermion metals, and colossal magnetoresistance manganites.
Dai’s work has been devoted to understanding the way materials work: how they’re structured; what properties they exhibit and why. He has made key contributions to the study of superconductors, particularly in investigating the role of magnetism.
Dai came to UT in 2001 from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where he was a member of the Solid State Division. His research group has been prolific in publishing their work (17 papers, and counting, in 2012 alone) and their 2009 cornerstone Nature paper on iron-based superconductors (“Magnetic order close to superconductivity in the iron-based layered LaO1-xFxFeAs Systems”) has been cited more than 900 times.
In 2003, Dai was honored as one of three outstanding young researchers by the Overseas Chinese Physics Association. In 2008, he was named a UT Joint Institute for Advanced Materials Chair of Excellence “for his pioneering work in elucidating the origin of the novel functionality in correlated electron materials using neutron scattering.”