Professor Xiaoyan Song is the Director of the Key Laboratory of Advanced Functional Materials, Education Ministry of China. She is a National Distinguished Professor and winner of China National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars. She got science and technology awards five times. She has published over 380 papers in peer reviewed journals and has over 90 authorized international and domestic patents. Combining experiments with computational materials science, her group focuses on the design and development of WC based hard metals, W based composites, refractory high-entropy alloys and rare-earth functional materials, as well as studies on the relationship between microstructures and properties of those materials.