Zhiyuan Zeng

Professor ,City University of Hong Kong,,Hong Kong

Prof. Zhiyuan Zeng received his BSc, MPhil and PhD degrees all in MSE from Central South University, Zhejiang University and Nanyang Technological University in 2006, 2008 and 2013, respectively. After 4 years as a postdoc at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and 2 years Engineer working in Applied Materials Inc. (Silicon Valley), he joined the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, City University of Hong Kong as an Assistant Professor in 2019, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2024, and then Professor in 2026. His research interests are intercalation phase engineering of transition metal dichalcogenides for phase-switchable preparation of TMDs, including conventional and unconventional phases, which significantly enhance the physical and chemical properties of TMDs for a variety of applications, such as superconducting quantum devices, thermoelectric generators, sensors, adsorption, and separation, among others. He has published 181 SCI papers (133 IF > 10), including Nat. Mater., Nat. Rev. Chem., Nat. Synth., Nat. Protoc., Nat. Commun, Natl. Sci. Rev., etc, with total citation 29723 times and H-index of 77. He was the “2018 Youth Thousand Talents Plan” awardee. He was awarded the 2023/2024 Young Collaborative Research Grant (YCRG, 4,832,040 HKD) by the University Grants Committee (UGC) of Hong Kong. He has been listed as the Highly Cited Researcher (Top 1%, Clarivate Analytics) 5 times in 2024 - 2018. He was also awarded the Lifetime Fellow by IAAM and the CENG Research Excellence Awards for Junior Faculty by CityUHK in 2025.