Faculty Directory

Yichao Zhang joined the Department of Materials Science and Engineering as an Assistant Professor in the Spring of 2025 after completing her postdoctoral training at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with Prof. Pinshane Huang.  She received her Ph.D. in Materials Science with Prof. David. J. Flannigan from the University of Minnesota in 2021, where she was a Louise T. Dosdall fellow and Phi Kappa Phi doctoral dissertation fellow, and her bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering from Kansas State University in 2016. Her research focuses on combining ultrahigh spatial and temporal resolutions of in situ electron microscopy techniques to investigate energy transport and structural transformations in novel electronic and quantum materials at the atomic scale.

• Quantum materials
• 2D moirés
• van der Waals ferroelectrics
• Light-matter interaction
• Structural dynamics
• Aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscopy
• In situ imaging
• Ultrafast electron microscopy
• Electron ptychography

Spring 2025: ENMA 671 Defects in Materials

Select Journal Articles:

• Zhang, Y.*; Baek, J. -H.*; Lee, C. -H.; Jung, Y.; Hong, S. C.; Nolan, G.; Watanabe, K; Taniguchi, T.; Lee, G. -H; Huang, P. Y. Atom-by-atom Imaging of Moiré Transformations in 2D Transition Metal Dichalcogenides. Sci. Adv. 2024, 10, eadk1874.
• Zhang, Y.; Choi, M.-K.; Haugstad, G.; Tadmor, E. B.; Flannigan, D. J. Holey Substrate-Directed Strain Patterning in Bilayer MoS₂. ACS Nano 2021, 15, 20253–20260.
• Zhang, Y.; Flannigan, D. J. Imaging Nanoscale Phonon Softening at Crystal Step Edges with 4D Ultrafast Electron Microscopy. Nano Lett. 2021, 21, 7332–7338.
• Zhang, Y.; Flannigan, D. J. Observation of Anisotropic Strain-Wave Dynamics and Few-Layer Dephasing in MoS₂ with Ultrafast Electron Microscopy. Nano Lett. 2019, 19, 8216– 8224.