Assistant Professor
Chemical and Biological Engineering
3035 NERC
(205) 348-4281
(205) 348-7558
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Dr. Qing Peng’s group focuses on understanding the surface/interfacial phenomena during the assembly of materials from molecular building blocks, or Molecular Legos. With this fundamental knowledge, the group is interested in developing assembly strategies of ultrathin new materials to address challenges facing the sustainable energy utilization.
Energy is critical to the sustainable development of the human society. Most of the challenges in the human society can be addressed if we can harvest a large amount of energy in a sustainable way. New materials play the critical role in developing sustainable methods of energy utilization. Surface/interfacial properties of the materials often determine the performance of the materials in the energy related applications ranging from solar energy conversion, electrochemical energy conversion and energy storage, 2D microelectronics, flexible electronics and biomaterials.
Our interests are to develop new methods to assemble materials with control of the composition and structures down to the atomic level. We are interested in understanding the nucleation and growth mechanisms of vapor-substrate reactions by in‐situ/ex‐situ analytic methods for the purpose of growing materials with the controlled physiochemical properties. With the thorough understandings of the devices’ physics and substrate chemistry, we are also interested in employing novel molecular assembly strategies in tuning the surface/interfacial chemistry and micro‐structures of materials, and establishing the structure‐property relationship of materials.
