Materials scientist Pei Qibing appointed director at University of Macau

Materials scientist Pei Qibing has been appointed as a chair professor and director of the Institute of Applied Physics and Materials Engineering at the University of Macau. Pei, who spent 30 years in the United States as an emeritus professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, will take up his new post in Macau.

Pei's academic journey began in humble circumstances in a rural school on an island in the Yangtze River in China's Anhui province. According to a former classmate, Wang Xianglong, students at his primary school had to bring their own stools due to a lack of chairs, and Pei and his elder sister were in the same class because the school did not have enough students to open a class for every year.

Pei later pursued higher education, studying chemistry at Nanjing University in 1981. His extensive research career has resulted in numerous publications in high-impact scientific journals, covering diverse fields such as transparent semicrystalline polymers for smart windows, multilayer ferroelectric polymer stacks for infrared information encryption, flexible carbon nanotube transistors for glucose biosensing, and self-regenerative heat pumps based on ferroelectric polymers.