Ping GAO

Professor
Head of Advanced Materials Thrust, Hub PG Coordinator

Professor Ping GAO received PhD in Chemical Engineering, Cambridge University in 1990. Her PhD thesis was on “Swelling and Drawing Behavior of Ultrahigh Molecular Weight Polyethylene” supervised by Professor Malcolm R. Mackley, FREng. She went on to conduct postdoctoral research under Professor Mackley until 1993, when she joined HKUST as an assistant professor. Her research focuses are on engineering polymer microstructures for high performance materials; her research group has made a number of seminal and technological breakthroughs by translating basic science into great technology. Notably, their original research on shear-induced phase transitions in thermotropic liquid crystalline polymers (TLCPs) led to the elucidation of 90% bulk viscosity reductions in polymer melts containing ppm level TLCPs. Part of the work was adopted in the 2nd edition of an undergraduate textbook “Introduction to Synthetic Polymers” by Ian Campbell, 1999, Oxford University Press. Her research group invented the world’s strongest bullet-proof carbon nanotube reinforced UHMWPE nanofiber by engineering order parameters in UHMWPE that exhibited 80 times of the tensile strength of stainless steel 304 with the same mass. They proposed a three-stage reinforcement hypothesis, and elucidated the unique simultaneous stiffening and toughening mechanisms in nanocomposites. The work was in collaboration with world’s largest bullet-proof fiber manufacturer, DSM (the Netherlands), and the media release made by HKUST on 23 April 2006 was featured worldwide.

Her research group has since started designing 2D but ultrastrong UHMWPE membranes. By engineering molecular conformations in the nanostructures of the material, and fabricating a topologically triangulated Delaunay structure in the plane of the film, they discovered the world’s strongest, and toughest 2D membrane; the filed patent was featured at the USPTO’s website as a news feed on 4 July 2019. The significance of their discovery means that nanomaterials can be used independently as macroscopic load bearing structures, enabling ordinary people to witness and appreciate nanotechnology. The citation of the media release by HKUST on 21 December 2020 reads: researchers from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology have developed an ultrathin polymer nanofilm, which is not only 25 times stronger than stainless steel with the same mass, but is also extremely transparent, gas-permeable, water-proof with adjustable porous properties, making it suitable for use as wearable devices, medical protection, desalination, electronics, solar cells and many other cutting-edge technologies.

Research Interests

  • Polymer
  • Rheology of polymers
  • 2D Porous polymer films
  • Polymer membranes for biomedical, energy, environment and sensors
  • high-performance polymer fibers, films and composites
  • Nanocomposites