Dr. Cao’s main research expertise is in the area of metallurgy of metallic materials, materials characterization, corrosion and/or mechanical property degradation of materials in high temperature nuclear environments (supercritical water, supercritical carbon dioxide, molten salt, and impure helium for very high temperature reactor), emissivity measurement of nuclear materials, and ion beam analysis (rutherford backscattering spectrometry and nuclear reaction analysis). He has a lot of hands-on experience in building different laboratory scale experimental systems. He received several prestigious awards from American Welding Society and American Foundry Society. In July 2016, he joined Idaho National Laboratory (INL), working on pyroprocessing and electrochemistry of molten salt.