Miaofang Chi, a corporate fellow at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), has earned the Innovation in Materials Characterization Award from the Materials Research Society (MRS).
The award “honors an outstanding advance in materials characterization that notably increases knowledge of the structure, composition, in situ behavior under outside stimulus, electronic behavior, or other characterization features, of materials,” according to MRS. The award pointed to Chi’s work on the “development and innovative application of atomic-scale scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) techniques, significantly contributing to the understanding and design of high-performance solid-solid interfaces in energy materials and devices such as solid-state batteries and heterogeneous catalysts.”
Chi is a researcher in the Electron Microscopy and Microanalysis Group at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, a DOE Office of Science national user facility at ORNL. She specializes in the development and application of novel electron microscopy techniques for energy and quantum materials. Her current research focuses on understanding mass and electron transport and redistribution behavior at the atomic scale at functional interfaces in materials and systems for energy storage, sustainability and quantum information science.
Chi joined ORNL in 2008 as a staff scientist. She received her doctorate in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of California, Davis. She is a fellow of MRS, the Microscopy Society of America (MSA) and the Royal Society of Chemistry. She has won numerous awards, including the Burton Medal from MSA and the Kurt Heinrich Award from the Microanalysis Society.
Chi received a trophy and gave a talk at the 2026 MRS Spring Meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii, in late April.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for DOE’s Office of Science. The single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, the Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit https://science.energy.gov/ – Greg Cunningham
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