Dr. Zaoli Zhang holds a senior scientist and group leader position at the Erich Schmid institute of Materials Science, Austrian Academy of Sciences. He studied materials physics, and received his PhD at the University of Science and Technology Beijing in 1997, completed his habilitation at the University of Leoben, Austria, in 2013. In 2000 – 2008, he worked at the Max-Planck institute for Metals Research in Stuttgart, and then he held a staff scientist position at the Fritz-Haber Institute and at the University of Ulm. His research fields cover electron microscopy and spectroscopy analysis of various structured and functional materials. Of special interests are interface-triggered phenomena in heterointerface structures, and deformation-induced phenomena in nanostructured materials, as well as structural evolution process with in-situ TEM/HRTEM and spherical aberration-corrected microcopy techniques. He is heading a TEM research group at the institute, and supervises PhD students and postdocs, and makes a great effort to correlate the structure with property of materials at the atomic scale. He has published around 110 peer-reviewed articles.