Xie Zhang is a tenured professor at Northwestern Polytechnical University. His research focuses on first-principles investigations of defects and phase transformations in advanced materials. He has published more than 90 peer-reviewed papers in top-tier international journals, including Nature Materials (2), Nature Computational Science (2), PNAS, Nature Communications, Science Advances, Physical Review Letters (5), Journal of the American Chemical Society (4), Advanced Energy/Functional Materials/Science (9), and Applied Physics Reviews (2). He received the Ourstanding Research Achievement Award from the Solid State Lighting and Energy Electronics Center, University of California, Santa Barbara in 2018. In 2019, he was awarded the Early-Career Prize for High-Impact Scientific Computing by the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center of the U.S. Department of Energy. He serves on the Youth Editorial Boards of Materials Research Letters, Chinese Physics Letters, Chinese Physics B, Acta Physica Sinica, and Physics.