Ching-Ming Wei, Ph.D., IAMS Distinguished Research Fellow, won the 2019 Merit MOST Research Fellow Award. The award is given to outstanding researchers who have been awarded the Outstanding Research Awards twice (or thrice) and the Merit Research Projects twice by MOST. Dr. Wei obtained this award based on his research achievement for the development and application of theoretical tools for surface structure determination and for the significant computational work on surface clusters and the quantum size effect in metal thin films. In recent years, Dr. Wei has focused on using the diffusion quantum Monte Carlo (DQMC) method to involve the electronic many-body effect and use it to check the accuracy of DFT applications for various material systems. Dr. Wei has also developed the Ab-Initio Random Structure Searching approach to search the global minimum for complicated material systems. A code named the “Random Structure Searching With Object (RSSWO),” which takes advantage of the “object” concept to substantially reduce the number of independent structural dimensions and enables the search of the global minimum in a complicated system, is generated.
Dr. Wei is also the recipient of the Ho Chin Tui Award (2003), the Outstanding Research Award (1994, 1999, 2004), and the Achievement in Asia Award from OCPA (1996); in addition, he was selected as a fellow of The Physical Society of Taiwan (1997) and American Physical Society (2011).
