Contact
Professor, Faculty of Engineering - Chemical and Materials Engineering Dept
- xuehua1@ualberta.ca
Overview
Area of Study / Keywords
Supervisor Nanomaterials and Nanofabrication Transport Phenomena - Fluid dynamics/ mass and heat transfer Nanomaterials and Nanofabrication Oil Sands Energy Surface Science and Engineering Surface and interfacial science
About
Professor Xuehua Zhang completed her PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University with her thesis on surface nanobubbles. After her PhD study, she first worked as an Endeavour Research Fellow in Department of Applied Math, Australian National University in Canberra (capital of Australia), and then was a postdoctoral fellow in University of Melbourne. She was awarded with a prestigious ARC Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2008 and then with also prestigious ARC Future Fellowship in 2012. From 2014 she joined RMIT University in Melbourne as an Associate Professor in Chemical Engineering and around the same period she was also appointed as a part-time Professor in Physics of Fluids Group at University of Twente in Enschede, the Netherlands. In September 2017, she came to Edmonton Canada and became a Professor in Chemical and Materials Engineering, University of Alberta. Her research areas lie in colloid and interface sciences, nanomaterials and fluid dynamics. She collaborates broadly and enjoys working with bright students and junior researchers.
Research
The research in the Soft Matter & Interfaces Research Group is collaborative and interdisciplinary. The areas span from colloid and interface sciences and engineering, physics of fluids to advanced materials. Current topics include:
- Formation and properties of micro-/nano- scale bubbles and droplets
- Chemical reactions of nanodroplets
- (De-)wetting of liquid on complex surfaces
- Evaporation in multicomponent systems
- Dilution-triggered microphase separation
- Functional surface microstructures for solar harvesting
Keywords: Soft Matter, Interfaces, Wetting, Oil Sands, Liquid-liquid microextraction, Nanoprecipitation, Evaporation, Atomic Force Microscopy, Confocal Microscopy.