Momentum - The Magazine for Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering Vol. 3 No. 1 Spring 2018 | Page 18

Tian grew up in a
rural area of China
with her parents, both
middle school teachers.
Growing up in a
rural, underdeveloped
area of China, Tian
was faced with the dual
threat of a not-very-good
educational
environment and
discrimination
against girls.
Unlike many,
Zhiting Tian
however, she had
China
an out – parents,
Yuzhong Tian
and Tingrong
Liao, who were
both middle school teachers and encouraged
her love of learning.
“They bought me books that featured
famous female scientists like Marie Curie,
and told me girls could achieve what boys
could if not more,” Tian said from her office
in Goodwin Hall. Tian’s parents brought her
to Beijing after she graduated from middle
school and showed her Tsinghua University,
the top university in China, where she would
eventually earn her bachelor’s degree in
Engineering Physics in 2007.
MOMENTUM
SPRING 2018
Tian’s opportunity of pursuing
graduate education in Mechanical
Engineering (ME) arrived when she
learned a female ME faculty Dr. Ying
Sun at Binghamton University, who is also
a Tsinghua alumnae, was recruiting graduate
students. “I talked to her over the phone, and
she offered me research and teaching assis-
tantship for a master’s degree. She encouraged
me to try this new field to see if I liked it.
She said if I liked, she would fully support
my Ph.D. application to top universities. So
I went to Binghamton in 2009 and started
working on nanoscale heat transfer. I very
much appreciate the opportunity Dr. Sun of-
fered me to enter this new field. It was neither
my undergraduate major nor my advisor’s
key research
area, so I had
to learn a lot
from scratch.”
"My par-
ents told
me, "girls
could
achieve
what boys
could, if
not more."
Tian taught
herself about
phonons and
molecular
dynamics,
and started
reading the
literature
and found
phonons
unexpectedly
interesting.
Tian read a lot
of papers from
big names in nanoscale heat transfer field,
among them is Dr. Gang Chen at MIT.
“When I start reading papers in this field, I
didn’t quite understand. I sent emails to the
authors and asked questions and they were
very responsive,” Tian explained. “I learned
a tremendous amount and even made good
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