ABOUT

Wenjun (Rebecca) Cai is an assistant professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Virginia Tech. Prior to coming to VT in Aug 2018, Dr. Cai was a faculty member of the Mechanical Engineering department at the University of South Florida (USF). Her current research focuses on understanding the processing-structure-property relationships of metals and coatings under extreme conditions. She received her Bachelor’s degree from Fudan University in 2005 and her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2010, both in Materials Science and Engineering. Her graduate research focused on tribology of metals, with a special emphasis on the relationship between materials’ microstructural evolution and their macroscopic tribological and mechanical behavior. She was a postdoc research associate at MIT from 2010-2012, working on the synthesis, characterization, and mechanical testing of lightweight metals.  She received Racheff-Intel award for outstanding graduate research at UIUC in 2010, National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2015, outstanding faculty award from USF in 2016, and TMS young leaders professional development award in 2017. 

Cai group in Materials Science and Engineering Department at Virginia Tech is an interdisciplinary research group at the interface of materials science, tribology, and corrosion. Our current research focuses on understanding the deformation and corrosion of materials under extreme conditions using experiments, analytical theory, and computer simulations. Learn more about our research here.