Yue Qi, the Joan Wernig Sorensen Professor of Engineering at Brown University, has received the 2025 Ross Coffin Purdy Award from The American Ceramic Society for a 2023 Nature Communications research paper. Presented annually, the Purdy honors the most valuable technical contribution to ceramic literature published two years prior. There were two awarded papers in 2025.
In this award-winning study, Qi and colleagues from the Weizmann Institute of Science and Stony Brook University tackled a timely challenge: how to create materials that change shape when electricity is applied - without relying on toxic lead. The answer came in the form of Zirconium-doped ceria, a lead-free ceramic that shows giant electrostriction. The new material falls into a class of substances that become deformed when exposed to an electric field, undergoing strains and stresses that are widely exploited in a slew of devices to produce tiny, precise movements.
In cell phones, for example, the slight deformation induced by voltage can set off the charging process, or move the lens to create autofocus. In industrial inkjet printers, a plate buckles when voltage is applied, ejecting a controlled amount of ink. According to Physics Today, the annual global market can be more than $20 billion when considering other examples such as sonar, ultrasound imaging, microphones and more. This breakthrough opens a promising path toward safer, more sustainable materials for sensors, actuators, and many everyday devices that rely on precise movement and control.
Boyuan Xu ’24, a Brown physics graduate student working in Qi’s lab at the time of the study, was a co-first author of the paper. Through modeling, he discovered that the fast electrostriction response in Zr-doped-ceria is enabled by the anharmonic motion of the smaller isovalent dopant (Zr) vibrating on the large ceria lattice. Under an electric field, their local deformation (elastic dipole) will align and accumulate, giving rise to observed electrostriction.
Qi attended the annual meeting of the ACS in September to accept the award, representing the team.
Ross Coffin Purdy, in whose honor this award is given, served the American Ceramic Society for 24 years as General Secretary and Editor of its publications. He was the recipient of many awards, a Fellow and Honorary Life Member, and President of the Society. The Purdy award is given to the author or authors who, in the judgment of the committee, made the most valuable contribution to ceramic technical literature published two years prior to the selection year.