Rate My Professor Kai Zhang

Kai Zhang is a Professor in the College of Chemistry at Nankai University. He received his B.Sc. in Materials Chemistry from Nankai University in 2010 and his Ph.D. in Materials Physics and Chemistry from the same institution in 2015, under the supervision of Prof. Jun Chen. Following his doctorate, he conducted postdoctoral research in the Department of Energy and Materials Engineering at Dongguk University in South Korea from 2015 to 2019 before returning to Nankai University as a faculty member in 2019.

Zhang’s research centers on the design and development of high-performance electrode materials and electrolytes for lithium-ion and sodium-ion batteries, along with studies in inorganic solid-state chemistry. He has authored or co-authored more than 90 peer-reviewed papers in leading journals such as Angewandte Chemie International Edition, Advanced Materials, Nature Communications, Joule, Energy & Environmental Science, and Chemical Society Reviews, accumulating over 14,000 citations with an H-index of 54 as of April 2024. His contributions have been recognized with awards including the First Prize of the Natural Science Award of the Ministry of Education of China (ranked second, 2020), selection for the National Young Talent Program, the Young Elite Scientists Sponsorship Program funded by the China Association for Science and Technology, and multiple Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher designations. Zhang currently serves as Deputy Director of the State Key Laboratory of Advanced Chemical Power Sources and holds editorial positions including Executive Associate Editor of eScience, along with various youth editorial board and committee roles in professional societies and journals. He has supervised numerous graduate and undergraduate students in energy materials research.