Tao Jinhui, former Senior Scientist at the U.S. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), is currently the Founder and Chief Scientist of the Tao Institute. He has long been engaged in research on interface science and in situ characterization technologies, with 16 years of technical accumulation. Dr. Tao received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from Zhejiang University in 2009, subsequently conducted postdoctoral research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), and later served as a Senior Scientist at PNNL. Since 2016, he has carried out independent scientific research, dedicated to advancing the application of in situ characterization technologies in biomaterials, energy materials, and functional interfaces. He was the first to reveal the non-classical nucleation mechanism in calcium phosphate nucleation through in situ AFM. Using dynamic force spectroscopy, he quantitatively measured the interactions between proteins and minerals. In addition, the Goldilocks effect he proposed revealed the fine regulatory mechanisms of multiple proteins in enamel mineralization, and he has extended in situ AFM to multiple frontier fields such as energy materials, MOFs, and battery interfaces. In terms of research projects, Dr. Tao has led or participated in multiple projects funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Department of Defense (DOD), and industry collaborations, and has played an important role in promoting the development of in situ multimodal AFM technologies. In terms of academic achievements, Dr. Tao has published more than 100 academic papers, many of which appeared in top international journals such as Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Nature Communications, and ACS Nano, with total citations exceeding 7,400 and an h-index of 44.
