Recently, the American Ceramic Society online presented the 2020 International Ceramics Awards. XJTU's professors Li Fei and Xu Zhuo won the Ross Coffin Purdy Award.

The research result of"designing ferroelectric ceramic materials with high voltage effect" by a team led byprofessorsXu Zhuo and Li Fei from XJTU's MOE Key Laboratory for Electronic Materials marked a breakthrough in the design and synthesis of high-performance piezoelectric ceramics. By introducing local structural disorder, Pb (Mg, Nb)O3-PbTiO3 piezoelectric ceramics doped with rare earth element Sm was synthesized for the first time. The piezoelectric coefficient was as high as1500 pC/N, which is twice that of soft piezoelectric ceramics for commercial use. The resultwas published in Nature Materialsin 2018 and was introduced bythe journal News&Views.