Rate My Professor Xueyan Song

Xueyan Song is the George B. Berry Chair Professor of Engineering and Professor in the Department of Mechanical, Materials and Aerospace Engineering at West Virginia University's Benjamin M. Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources. A materials scientist with over 25 years of experience in advanced transmission electron microscopy, having operated more than 20 TEM and STEM instruments, she specializes in physical metallurgy and electroceramics. She earned her B.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from Yanshan University in 1992, M.S. from the same institution in 1995, and Ph.D. from Zhejiang University in 1998, with her doctoral thesis on metallic materials for rechargeable metal-hydride batteries. Her career trajectory includes a postdoctoral fellowship at the Department of Materials Engineering, Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisbon, Portugal (1998-2000); Research Associate (2000-2003) and Research Scientist (2003-2006) at the Applied Superconductivity Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Research Scientist at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering there (2006-2008); and at WVU: Assistant Professor (2008-2014), Associate Professor (2014-2018), and Professor since 2018, all in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.

Professor Song's research centers on energy-related materials for generation, conversion, and transmission. Her group has pioneered advancements in thermoelectric ceramics, achieving a record ZT ≈ 0.9 at 1073 K in Ca₃Co₄O₉₋δ via nanostructuring, grain boundary engineering, and doping; solid oxide fuel cells, with up to 350% power density enhancement and 504-hour stability at 750°C using nano-catalysts, infiltration, and atomic layer deposition; high-temperature superconductors; compound semiconductors; and intermetallic compounds for turbine alloys. Funded by NSF, DOE ($1.25 million in 2021 for hydrogen technologies), Air Force, and EPSCoR, her NSF CAREER Award (2013) supported waste heat recovery research. Publications from her group appear in Nature, Nature Materials, Nano Letters, Physical Review Letters, Applied Physics Letters, and ACS Catalysis. Key papers include "Nanoionics Drastically Accelerating Mass Transfer at Elevated Temperatures in Dense Ionic Ceramics" (ACS Nano, 2016), "Nanoionics and Nanocatalysts: Conformal Mesoporous Coatings by Supersonic Cluster Beam Deposition" (Scientific Reports, 2016), "The Impact of Sintering Atmosphere and Temperature on the Sintering Behavior of LSM-YSZ Cathode Materials" (Journal of The Electrochemical Society, 2021), and "Chromium Tolerant, Highly Active and Stable Perovskite Cathode for Protonic Solid Oxide Fuel Cells" (2023). She holds patents on nanoscale SOFC and thermoelectric innovations. Honors include Outstanding Researcher of the Year, Statler College (2016, 2019), DOE-ORISE Faculty Fellowship (2012), and Air Force Summer Faculty Fellowship (2010). She teaches MAE 580 Crystallography and Crystal Analysis and MAE 583 Thermodynamics and Kinetics of Materials.