Dr. Zhai received his D.Phil (PhD) degree in materials science from University of Oxford in 1994. Since then, he worked as a Research Fellow at University of Oxford and Fraunhofer Institute for NDT, Germany. In 2001, he came to the University of Kentucky as an Assistant Professor. He has published more than 50 technical papers in the research areas of microstructure-property relationships, fatigue and fracture, failure analysis, and materials processing. He has been invited to several research institutes and universities to give lectures and talks about his research work.

Dr. Zhai's current research activities include fatigue properties of high strength aluminum alloys, surface enhancement of Ti and Al alloys, resistance spot welding of refractory metals, quantitative prediction of texture evolution during thermomechanical processing, and Ni-Tc separation, etc.