"I use computer simulations to understand and thereby control how electrons, atoms and molecules interact with each other and how such interactions determine the formation, function and degradation of materials."

With a physical chemistry background from Nankai University in China, Shuxia Tao started her PhD in 2007 at Department of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry, TU/e. There she learnt Computational Materials Science and earned her PhD in 2011 with a thesis on hydrogen storage in metal hydrides for battery applications. After a short career break to care for her children, from 2013 to 2016, she worked as a post-doctoral researcher at NWO physics institute NIKHEF for computational materials design for photodetectors.

With two prestigious personal grants, NWO-Shell Compotational Sceince for Energy Research tenure track grant in 2016 and NWO START-UP grant in 2019, she established her research group Computational Materials Physics at Department of Applied Physics, TU/e. Her current research focuses on the devolepment of atomistic (density functional theory) and multiscale (from atomic to nanoscale and from materials to device) computational methods and their application in energy materials. Her group is a part of Materials Simulation & Modelling (MSM) and she is a member of Center for Computational Energy Research (CCER) and Eindhoven Institute for Renewable Energy Systems (EIRES).