Amelia Liu

Amelia received her PhD from the University of Melbourne in 2003 and then worked as a post-doctoral researcher in the Electron Microscopy Center, Materials Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory (US-DoE) from 2004-2007. In 2008, Amelia returned to Australia, and began employment at Monash University where she has had a variety of roles including a Margaret Clayton Women in Research fellowship in the School of Physics and Astronomy (2009-2013) and managing research capabilities in the Monash Centre for Electron Microscopy (2014-2018). Amelia is currently an ARC Future Fellow in the School of Physics and Astronomy (2019-).

Amelia was recently awarded the Australian Microscopy and Microanalysis Society FEI Cowley-Moodie Award for Research in the Physical Sciences for the development of new methods to characterise the atomic structure of disordered materials.

Many materials have the ability to solidify in a disordered structure and form a glass if quenched rapidly enough from a molten phase. This includes particles varying by many decades in length scale (from granules, to colloids, to atoms) and with strikingly different inter-particle interactions that range from simply hard sphere – to attractive (and either directional or non-directional, for example, network and metallic glasses) – to repulsive (charged colloids).

Understanding the physics underlying this apparently universal behavior is a grand challenge and scientists have many unanswered questions. How can a material undergo a transition to a solid phase, and yet still retain the disordered structure of the parent melt? Is the glass transition a real phase transition at all? What role – if any – does structure play in the formation of the glass and its subsequent properties?

Glasses with their unique properties have been a major technological material for centuries. The lack of scientific understanding of why some systems can easily form a glass, and what underlies their undesirable brittle mechanical failure significantly impedes further development.

Amelia‘s research aims to develop new methods to measure the structure of disordered solids like glasses to understand if and how structure plays a role in their formation and properties. Advances in electron microscope optics and detector technology offer new opportunities for developing a “crystallography of disorder”. This could play a transformative role in the further understanding of complex, disordered materials in the same way as traditional crystallography has underpinned advances in knowledge in both the physical and biological sciences.

Amelia has a range of PhD projects on metallic, network and colloidal glasses that would suit a student interested in experimental materials physics, computational methods and developing new strategies for data analysis. These projects would involve use of the next-generation scanning-transmission electron microscope (UltraTEM) due to be installed in the Monash Centre for Electron Microscopy in late 2019 and the Australian Synchrotron. Please contact Amelia directly at any time to discuss these projects.