Zhenglu Li, assistant professor of materials science in the Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science. Image/ Juan Miche Rosales.
Zhenglu Li, an assistant professor of materials science in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, has been awarded a 2025 National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award — one of the United States’ most prestigious early-career faculty honors.
The five-year, $595,000 award recognizes Li’s pioneering work in theoretical and computational materials science and will fund his project titled “Coupling Between Correlated Electrons and Phonons from First Principles.” His research aims to uncover how electrons and atomic vibrations interact in complex materials — interactions that are central to materials used in technologies such as transistors, solar cells, and superconductors.
Established by the NSF to support early-career faculty with the potential to lead in both research and education, the CAREER Award helps scholars build a firm foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating academic research and teaching.
Li, who joined USC in 2023, brings a rich background in physics and materials science. He earned his Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2019, following a B.S. in physics from Fudan University in Shanghai. He later held postdoctoral positions at both UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He was previously awarded the 2021 American Physical Society Nicholas Metropolis Award for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Work in Computational Physics. He also received a Department of Energy INCITE Award for 2024 – 2025, offering his lab supercomputing time at Argonne and Oak Ridge National Laboratories.
At USC, Li leads the Computational Quantum Materials research group focused on developing advanced computational tools rooted in many-body quantum mechanics. His work emphasizes “first-principles” methods — methods that do not have adjustable parameters but instead rely on basic laws of quantum mechanics with general approximations. These techniques are instrumental in explaining highly complex behaviors like superconductivity and ultrafast energy transfer.
The NSF-funded project will target a central challenge in modern condensed matter physics: understanding how interacting electrons couple to lattice vibrations, also known as phonons. These interactions give rise to exotic quantum states and functionalities in advanced materials but remain difficult to simulate due to their inherent complexity.
“This award is enabling us to study the role of electron-phonon coupling in what we call correlated electronic materials. In such materials, the electrons are moving in a correlated manner, which is not easy to tackle. This means that it needs a higher level of quantum mechanical theory to describe it, which is what we do,” Li said.
Li has recently explored the nature of materials that have a kagome lattice atomic structure. The CAREER Award support will enable further investigation of these intriguing materials that may help the future design of next-generation technologies.
In addition to advancing fundamental science, the project includes an educational component designed to cultivate a new generation of materials scientists. Li plans to provide summer internships for high school and undergraduate students, develop tailored training for graduate researchers, and organize tutorial workshops on computational methods.
The Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science has been rapidly expanding capacity in advanced materials in recent years, introducing a Master of Materials Science with Machine Learning, and a new $2 million NSF-funded platform to harness AI for materials discovery. Li’s latest CAREER award recognition also represents a significant stride for scholarship in USC Viterbi’s materials space.
Published on May 28th, 2025
Last updated on May 28th, 2025
