Prof. Sow-Hsin Chen's Research Areas
One of the leading experts in soft condensed matter,
Prof. Chen's main research area is in the study of soft condensed matter using
thermal neutron, synchrotron x-ray, and laser light scattering spectroscopies.
His more recent studies include slow dynamics of confined water in deeply supercooled states, in porous glasses, and near hydrophilic
and hydrophobic surfaces such as those in MCM-41S porous silica, carbon
nanotubes, in cement, and on the surfaces of proteins, DNAs and RNA. Most
recently, his group discovered the strongest evidence so far for the existence
of a second low-temperature critical point of water. He is regarded as one of the foremost international experts on the
dynamic properties of water, both in theory and experiments. His work on the possible
existence of the second critical point of water was chosen by Prof. H. Eugene
Stanley, a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and expert in phase
transition of low-temperature water, as the most significant research in water
in the“last 6 months”(in Research Highlight
section of Nature, December 8, 2005 issue). His paper on“The violation of the Stokes–Einstein relation in supercooled
water”(PNAS 103, 12974, 2006) won the 2006 Cozzarelli prize
for the best paper in the Applied Physics category published in PNAS that year for its scientific
excellence and outstanding originality.
Prof. Chen has organized many international and
national conferences, including the groundbreaking First U.S.-China Workshop on
Neutron Science and Technology (2006), and Second USChina Workshop on
Scientific and Industrial Applications Using Neutrons, Muons
and Protons (2008). He has served on many major international and national advisory,
evaluative, and organizing committees. He was on the Organizing Committee of
the 2nd cyber enabled collaborative graduate course, Neutrons in Soft
Matter Science: Complex Materials on Mesoscopic
Scales, taught
by expert scientists and professors from 15 contributing institutions, offered
jointly by Oak Ridge National Laboratory and University of Tennessee during the
fall term of 2013. Currently he is a member of the Inelastic X-ray Scattering Beamline Advisory Team of NSLS-II IXS of the Brookhaven
National Laboratory, and serves as an Advisory Board member of the International Conference
on Water Sciences, at Peking University, Beijing, China, April 14-17, 2014; and a member of
the Advisory Committee of the International Symposium on Frontier Technology for the
Future: Low Carbon Energy and Life celebrating the 40th anniversary of College of
Nuclear Science and 50th anniversary of Department of Engineering
and System Science, NTHU, June 25-27, 2014 in conjunction with this
Lectureship.
Prof. Chen has received many award and honors,
which has been listed on p. 8 of this brochure. In May of 2014, he is bestowed
the Honorary Doctoral Degree of the University of Messina, Italy. He is an
author/editor of 5 books, and over 450 research articles published in journals
like Nature, Science, PNAS, Physical Review, Physical Review Letters, etc. He
latest 6th book, Scattering Methods in Complex Fluids: Selected Topics, co-authored with Prof. Piero Tartaglia of Univesity of Rome, is to be published by Cambridge
University Press, 2014. The NTHU Press is to publish his biography in 2014 as
well.
Two of Prof. Chen’s mentors are the
co-Nobel Prize winners in physics in 1994 – Prof. Chen’s Ph.D. supervisor,
Prof. B.N. Brockhouse
of McMaster University, Canada (right) and long-time colleague at MIT, Prof.
Clifford G. Shull(center).
The picture was taken in 1995 at the Nobel
Prize Celebration Symposium at the McMaster University.