Current Members

Professor Qibing Pei

Eduacation: Ph.D. 1990 Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing.

Research Interest: Stretchable Polymer Electronics; Conjugated polymers; Electroactive polymer artificial muscles; Nanostructured materials; Polymer actuators and generators; Radiation detection; Polymer synthesis; Polymer composite.

Email: qpei at seas.ucla.edu

Personal Website: http://www.mse.ucla.edu/qibing-pei/

Postdoctoral Researcher

Yuan Meng

Yuan earned his PhD at University of Rochester, majoring in Chemical Engineering. He worked briefly at National Institute of Standards and Technology before joining Pei group in 2018. Yuan is interested broadly in smart materials, stretchable electronics, and polymer physics. His current project involves electrocaloric device design and artificial muscle fabrication.

Ye Shi

Ye Shi graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, with a PhD degree in Materials Science and Engineering. He worked as a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech and then joined Pei Group. His projects involve synthesis of new dielectric elastomers and fabrication of high-performance actuators.

Meng Gao

Meng joined professor Pei’s group as a postdoc in 2019. She received her Ph.D. degree at Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, majoring in material science. Her research interest includes triboelectric nanogenerator, wearable sensor, and artificial muscle.

Graduate Student

Zhixin (Jason) Xie

Zhixin joined Prof. Pei’s group in 2015 as a PhD student. He received his bachelor’s degree in Polymer Materials and Engineering at Chu Kochen Honors College, Zhejiang University.

Hexing Yin

Hexing received his bachelor degree in Nanjing University in 2016, at the same year he joined Prof. Pei’s group as a PhD student. His current research interest include organic/polymer light-emitting diodes, dielectric nanocomposites and energy storage materials.

Kareem Youssef

Kareem graduated with a B.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from Northwestern University. As an undergraduate, he worked on high throughput melting temperature prediction of inorganic solids via machine learning. He joined the Soft Materials Research Lab (SMRL) in 2017 to begin his PhD. His research interests include stretchable electronic materials design, light-emitting electrochemical cells, and novel methods to produce low-cost optoelectronic devices.

Zihang Peng

Zihang joined Prof. Pei’s group in 2017 as a PhD student. She received her bachelor degree in Polymer Materials and Engineering at Sichuan University. Her research concentrates on applications of polymers for artificial muscles.

Roshan Plamthottam

Roshan Plamthottam received his B.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from Johns Hopkins University in 2018. He then joined Dr. Pei’s group later that year to pursue a Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research interests include nanomaterial processing and device development for flexible electronics.

Jianghan Wu

Jianghan Wu joined Prof. Pei’s group in 2018 as a PhD student. She received her bachelor’s degree in Materials Chemistry at Xi’an Jiaotong University. Her current research interest includes flexible electronics.

Hanxiang Wu

Hanxiang earned his B.S. in Microelectronics from Peking University (2018), and joined Soft Material Research Laboratory in the same year as a PhD student. His current research interests include flexible electronics and implantable bioelectrodes.

Jiacheng Fan

Jiacheng joined Prof. Pei’s group in 2018 as a PhD student. He received his bachelor’s degree in Opto-Electronics information in Huazhong University of Science and Technology. His research concentrates on the organic/polymer light-emitting diodes and thermchromic smart windows.

Hao Yu

Hao joined Prof. Pei’s group in 2018 as a PhD student. He received his bachelor’s degree in Chemistry at Zhiyuan Honors College, Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Mingfei He

My name is Mingfei He, I received B.S. in NanoEngineering from UCSD in 2018, joined in 2019 as a master student. My current research is thermchromic smart windows.

Jinsung Kim

Jinsung Kim is a PhD student at MSE department and joined Soft Material Research Laboratory in 2019 after graduating from Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH). His current research interest is artificial muscle.

Alex Cheng

Alex received his B.S. in Materials Engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2019. He joined Professor Pei’s Soft Materials Research Laboratory in Fall 2019 to pursue a M.S. degree in Materials Science and Engineering. His research work/interests include polymers in electronics and biomedical applications, and formulation development.

Ziqing Han

Ziqing received her bachelor’s degree in Polymer Materials and Engineering from Beijing University of Chemical Technology in 2019. She joined Prof. Pei’s group in 2019 as a graduate student in Materials Science and Engineering. Her current research interest is organic matrix materials for plastic scintillators on radiation detection.

Isabelle Winardi

I completed my BS in Chemistry with a Specialization in Computing at UCLA, where I received the General Chemistry Instructional Laboratory Faculty Fellowship as well as the Geissman Award for Outstanding Achievement in Organic Chemistry. In 2020, the same year that I graduated college, I joined Professor Pei’s Soft Materials Research Laboratory in UCLA’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering as a PhD student, and my current research interests focus on solid polymer films for automatically modulated smart windows.

Visiting Graduate Students

Junhong Pu

Junhong Pu joined Prof. Pei’s group in 2019 as a visiting graduate student. At the same time, he is a Phd student in Sichuan University of China.
Research focus: electrocaloric cooling

Ying Liu

Ying Liu joined Prof. Pei’s lab in 2019 as a visiting graduate researcher. At the same time, she is a Phd student in Donghua University. Her research focuses on conductive polymer composites and their applications.