YAO Xi, a Chinese materials scientist, is currently a professor at Xi'an Jiaotong University and Tongji University. He graduated from the Department of Electrical Engineering, Jiao Tong University in 1957. In 1982, he received his Ph.D. in solid-state science from Pennsylvania State University. He was elected a fellow of the American Ceramic Society in 2001. In 1991, he elected member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

YAO’s research interests include dielectric materials and devices, ferroelectrics, the piezoelectric/pyroelectric materials/devices, oxide and compound semiconductors and devices, functional nanocomposite materials and devices, and integrated ferroelectrics. He has published more than 500 refereed papers, authored or co-authored 7 books, and holds 12 patents in China, Singapore, and the USA. He discovered the piezoelectric resonance phenomenon of ceramic grains in the study of the twin and polycrystalline interfaces, and the dielectric spectrum of polycrystalline aggregates with randomly distributed grain sizes and orientations was calculated using computer circuit simulation methods. The results are in good agreement with the experiments. After a systematic study of the polarization relaxation in ferroelectrics, he discovered a series of new phenomena such as microdomain-macrodomain transition, electric field-induced nanostructure adjustment, and super paraelectric state, which are of great significance for the development of smart materials.

His bio is available on the official website of CAS:

http://casad.cas.cn/sourcedb_ad_cas/zw2/ysxx/jskxb/200906/t20090624_1808173.html