Rate My Professor Jincheng Du

Jincheng Du serves as Department Chair and University Distinguished Research Professor of Materials Science and Engineering in the College of Engineering at the University of North Texas. He received his Ph.D. in Ceramics from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 2004, M.S. in Inorganic Materials from Wuhan University of Technology in 1995, and B.S. in Materials Science from Wuhan University of Technology in 1992. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory from 2004 to 2006 and serving as a research associate at the University of Virginia from 2006 to 2007, he joined the University of North Texas in 2007 as an assistant professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. He progressed to associate professor with tenure in 2012, full professor in 2017, and was appointed University Distinguished Research Professor in 2024. Throughout his tenure at UNT, Dr. Du has held key leadership positions, including graduate advisor and graduate program director from 2012 to 2019, associate department chair for the graduate program from 2017 to 2019, interim associate dean for research in the College of Engineering from January to June 2024, and current department chair since September 2024. He has also been a visiting professor at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in Italy in 2014 and guest professor at Meiji University in Japan in 2015, as well as a Fulbright Scholar and visiting professor at Federal University of São Carlos in Brazil in 2020 and Gordon S. Fulcher Sabbatical Fellow at Corning Inc. in 2021.

Dr. Du's research expertise centers on atomistic computer simulations of glass, ceramics, and nanostructured materials, with emphasis on developing empirical potentials and computational tools to investigate structure, surfaces, interfaces, composition-structure-property relations of bioactive glasses, glasses for nuclear waste immobilization, glass-water interactions, corrosion behaviors, glass-crystal interfaces, and defects in ceramics. His work has attracted over $18 million in total external funding, with $6 million as principal or co-principal investigator from NSF, DOE (including ARPA-E, EFRC, NEUP), AFRL, ARL, SRC, and industry. He has authored over 220 peer-reviewed journal articles, 20 conference proceedings papers, two books including 'Atomistic Simulations of Glasses: Fundamentals and Applications' (2022, John Wiley & Sons) and contributions to 'Molecular Dynamics Simulations of Disordered Materials' (2015), and seven book chapters. His publications have garnered more than 10,400 citations with an h-index of 56. Dr. Du has delivered over 90 plenary, invited talks, and seminars at national and international conferences. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including Fellow of ASM International (2021), Gordon S. Fulcher Distinguished Scholar of Corning Inc. (2021), Fellow of the American Ceramic Society (2020), Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award (2020), W.E.S. Turner Award of the International Commission on Glass (2019), Research Leadership Award of UNT (2018), Faculty Research Award of the College of Engineering (2016), and Early Career Award for Research and Creativity of UNT (2012). Additionally, he chairs the Technical Committee on atomistic simulation and modeling of glasses of the International Commission on Glass, served as past chair of the Glass and Optical Materials Division of the American Ceramic Society, and holds editorial positions such as Editor of the Journal of the American Ceramic Society and Associate Editor of the International Journal of Applied Glass Science and Frontiers in Materials: Ceramics and Glass.