Dr. Yingxia Liu is currently a tenure-track assistant professor at the City University of Hong Kong, working on reliability issues in advanced electronic packaging. Before joining CityU in 2021, Dr. Liu worked at Intel as a Quality and Reliability R&D Engineer, in charge of solving the issues related to Intel’s Embedded Multi-Die Interconnect Bridge (EMIB) technology. Dr. Liu received her Ph.D. from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles in 2016 and a bachelor’s degree from the College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, Peking University in 2012. The research interest of Dr. Liu includes systematic reliability tests to predict lifetime and fundamental studies on the next generation materials in advanced electronic packaging structures. Her current research also focuses on the anti-pathogen effect of metal materials. Her work was published in Acta Materialia, Scripta Materialia, Applied Physics Review, etc.
The pandemic of coronavirus SARS-COV-2 leads us to the question of how to make human society more reliable under the strike of virus. The virus with a high spontaneous mutation rate challenges the cognitive process and the development of antiviral agents. The killing of virus and bacteria on copper surfaces is known, and the mechanism is explained as copper ions released from a copper surface. On an ordinary copper surface, it will take a few hours to kill the virus. In this talk, we try to enhance the virus-killing reaction rate by the design of copper surface microstructure. We made a copper surface by depositing (111)–oriented nanotwin and studied the killing effect of Feline Infectious Peritonitis Virus (FIPV). By making clear the chemistry and physics mechanism behind virus killing on copper surfaces, we will try to increase the virus-killing rate further. In the future, we can make a copper filter for air quality control in public buildings, for example, the filter can be installed in the ventilation system, on the ceiling of restaurants, or in other common places to purify the air and prevent the spread of the contaminated air. We can also make recyclable copper masks for individual people.