Dr. Jianghua Chen has engaged in the field of transmission electron microscopy (TEM) for materials science for 35 years and mainly focuses on the development of TEM theories and methods for diffraction and imaging techniques, and on the TEM applications to materials research. Currently, he is the dean of the college of materials science and engineering and the director of the Center for High-Resolution Electron Microscopy (CHREM) at Hunan University, China. Previously, he worked as a lecturer at Sichuan University for 8 years (1986--1994). Then he had worked in Europe for 14 years. Firstly in Belgium he did his Ph.D study and a postdoc job in the Electron Microscopy Lab at the University of Antwerp (1994--1998). Then in Germany he worked at Research Center Juelich for two years on the world first prototype Cs-corrected TEM. He then worked as a permanent senior scientist of the Netherlands Institute for Metals Research. After 2007, he gradually transferred his position from Holland to China
Dr. Jianghua Chen established a few theories and methods for accurate and quantitative analysis of diffraction and imaging in TEM, and also developed a few techniques for achieving atomic-resolution imaging in modern TEM. Having mastered the advanced TEM instruments, he demonstrated as a pioneer how to determine the structures of small precipitates in aluminum alloys using quantitative atomic-imaging techniques. Based on the precisely determined precipitate structures, he revealed the quick-bake-hardening mechanism of the automotive AlMgSi alloys at the atomic-scale. Since then he solved many structure problems in metals.
Dr. Chen holds 10 patents and has published more than 160 papers. Due to his great contribution to electron microscopy for materials science, he has won many awards including the prestigious Distinguished Scientists Award 2016, granted by China Association for Science and Technology, and the honorable title of Chang Jiang Scholar Professor, grated by China Ministry of Education in 2008.