Founding Members

Professor Zhenan Bao is Department Chair and K.K. Lee Professor of Chemical Engineering, and by courtesy, a Professor of Chemistry and a Professor of Material Science and Engineering at Stanford University. Bao founded the Stanford Wearable Electronics Initiate (eWEAR) in 2016 and serves as the faculty director.

Prior to joining Stanford in 2004, she was a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff in Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies from 1995-2004. She received her Ph.D in Chemistry from the University of Chicago in 1995. She has over 500 refereed publications and over 65 US patents with a Google Scholar H-Index >155.

Bao is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Inventors. She is a Fellow of MRS, ACS, AAAS, SPIE, ACS PMSE and ACS POLY.

Bao was selected as Nature’s Ten people who mattered in 2015 as a “Master of Materials” for her work on artificial electronic skin. She was awarded the Gibbs Medal by the Chicago session of ACS in 2020, University of Chicago Alumni Award by the Department of Chemistry in 2020, the Wilhelm Exner Medal by Austrian Federal Minister of Science 2018, ACS Award on Applied Polymer Science 2017, the L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Award in the Physical Sciences 2017, the AICHE Andreas Acrivos Award for Professional Progress in Chemical Engineering in 2014, ACS Carl Marvel Creative Polymer Chemistry Award in 2013, ACS Cope Scholar Award in 2011, the Royal Society of Chemistry Beilby Medal and Prize in 2009, the IUPAC Creativity in Applied Polymer Science Prize in 2008.

Yi Cui is a Chinese-American materials scientist, specializing in nanotechnology, and energy and environment-related research. Cui is a Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, and by courtesy, of Chemistry at Stanford University. He currently serves as the director of the Precourt Institute for Energy, succeeding Arun Majumdar and Sally Benson. He also serves as a co-director of the Bay Area Photovoltaics Consortium, the Battery500 Consortium, and the StorageX initiative. He is a faculty member of Stanford Photon Science of SLAC and principle investigator at the Stanford Institute for Materials & Energy Sciences. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Materials Research Society (MRS),[ Electrochemical Society (ECS), and the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC).

He has been one of the world's most-cited researchers (Clarivate Analytics) and most influential scientific minds (Thomson Reuters). He has published over 500 research papers with an H-index of 206 (Google Scholar). He currently serves as the Executive Editor of Nano Letters from ACS Publications.

Yiguang Ju received his bachelor's degree in Engineering Thermophysics from Tsinghua University in 1986, and his PhD degree in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Tohoku University in 1994. He is the Robert Porter Patterson Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and serves as the Director of Sustainable Energy Program.

Prof. Ju’s research interests include combustion, fuels, propulsion, and low carbon energy conversion. He has published more than 250 refereed journal articles. He is a fellow of ASME and a founding fellow of the Combustion Institute. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Combustion Institute and the Institute for Dynamics of Explosions and Reactive Systems. He served as the Chair of the US Sections of the Combustion Institute and Associate Editors of AIAA Journal and Combustion Science and Technology. He has received many awards including the Distinguished Paper Awards from the International Symposium on Combustion (2011, 2015, 2021), the NASA Director’s Certificate of Appreciation award (2011), the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2011), the International Prize from Japanese Combustion Society (2018), and is a plenary lecturer of the 38th International Symposium on Combustion (2021).

Ju Li received a bachelor's degree in modern physics from University of Science and Technology of China in 1994 and a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from MIT in 2000. He is currently a professor of nuclear science and engineering and materials science and engineering at MIT. His group (http://Li.mit.edu) develops new materials in energy and computing. Ju is on the Clarivate Highly Cited Researchers and Webometrics h > 100 list (global rank 3383 Mar. 2021). He is a recipient of the 2005 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the 2006 Materials Research Society Outstanding Young Investigator Award, and the TR35 award from Technological Review. Ju was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2014, a Fellow of the Materials Research Society in 2017, and a Fellow of AAAS in 2020.

Yang Shao-Horn is W.M. Keck Professor of Energy in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT. Her research is centered on using physical/material chemistry to control kinetics and dynamics in processes of making zero-carbon energy, chemicals and fuels. Prof. Shao-Horn is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Electrochemical Society, the National Academy of Inventors and the International Society of Electrochemistry. Her work has been recognized by the Faraday Medal of Royal Society of Chemistry 2018, the Dr. Karl Wamsler Innovation Award from the Technical University of Munich 2020 and Humbolt Prize in Chemistry from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation 2020. She has served on a number of advisory and corporate boards of non-profit and for-profit organizations, and has advised 90+ students and postdocs at MIT, who are now pursuing successful careers in industry, national research laboratories, and in academia (~30) including faculty positions at MIT and academic positions in Europe and Asia.

Xiao-Gang Wen received a BS in physics from University of Science and Technology of China in 1982 and a Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University in 1987.

He studied superstring theory under theoretical physicist Edward Witten at Princeton University. Wen later switched his research field to condensed matter physics while working with theoretical physicists Robert Schrieffer, Frank Wilczek, Anthony Zee in Institute for Theoretical Physics, UC Santa Barbara (1987-1989).

He became a five-year member of IAS at Princeton in 1989 and joined MIT in 1991. Wen is a Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics at MIT (2004-present), a Distinguished Moore Scholar at Caltech (2006), and a Distinguished Research Chair at Perimeter Institute (2009). Among other honors, Wen is a Sloan Foundation Fellow (1992); APS Fellow (2002), Isaac Newton Chair at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (2011), co-winner of the Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Physics Prize (2017) “for theories of topological order and its consequences in a broad range of physical systems“, and was elected to National Academy of Science (2018) in recognition of “distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.”

Zhihong Xia received in 1982 from Nanjing University a bachelor's degree in astronomy and in 1988 a PhD in mathematics from Northwestern University with thesis advisor Donald G. Saari and thesis The Existence of the Non-Collision Singularities. From 1988 to 1990 Xia was an assistant professor at Harvard University and from 1990 to 1994 an associate professor at Georgia Institute of Technology (and Institute Fellow). In 1994 he became a full professor at Northwestern University and since 2000 he has been the Arthur and Gladys Pancoe Professor of Mathematics. Xia's research is in the areas of Newtonian n-body problem, Hamiltonian dynamics and general hyperbolic and partially hyperbolic dynamical systems.

In 1993 Xia was the inaugural winner of the Blumenthal Award of the American Mathematical Society. From 1989 to 1991 he was a Sloan Fellow. From 1993 to 1998, he received the National Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation. In 1995 he received the Monroe H. Martin Prize in Applied Mathematics from the University of Maryland. In 1998 he was an Invited Speaker of the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin.

Yu Xie is Bert G. Kerstetter '66 University Professor of Sociology and PIIRS at Princeton University. His main areas of interest are social stratification, demography, statistical methods, Chinese studies, and sociology of science.

Xie joined the faculty Aug. 1 after 26 years at the University of Michigan, most recently as the Otis Dudley Duncan Distinguished University Professor of Sociology, Statistics and Public Policy and a research professor in the Population Studies Center at Michigan's Institute for Social Research. Xie's main areas of interest are social stratification, demography, statistical methods, Chinese studies and sociology of science. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Academia Sinica and the National Academy of Sciences.

His recently published works include: Marriage and Cohabitation (University of Chicago Press 2007) with Arland Thornton and William Axinn, Statistical Methods for Categorical Data Analysis with Daniel Powers (Emerald 2008, second edition), and Is American Science in Decline? (Harvard University Press, 2012) with Alexandra Killewald.

Xiaodong Zhang is the Robert M. Critchfield Professor in Engineering, working in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Ohio State University. His research interests focus on data management in computer and distributed systems. Several of his research results have been adopted in major computing and data processing systems by both commercial companies and open source software communities. He is a recipient of the 2020 ACM Microarchitecture Test of Time Award. To recognize his accomplishment as the Department Chair of Computer Science and Engineering at Ohio State, 2006-2018, he received the Joel and Ruth Spira Award for Excellence in Education Leadership from the Lutron Foundation in 2018. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Colorado at Boulder, where he received a Distinguished Engineering Alumni Award in 2011. He is a Fellow of the ACM, and a Fellow of the IEEE.

Yuanyuan (YY) Zhou is a Qualcomm Chair Professor at University of California, San Diego, where she joined since 2009. Prior to UCSD, she was a tenured associate professor at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

From 2000-2002, she co-founded a storage startup called Emphora in Princeton, NJ. In 2007, She co-founded her second startup, Pattern Insight. Pattern Insight has deployed solutions used by many large companies and became cash-flow positive since 2010, with a good exit to VmWare in 2012. She holds a Ph.D in Computer Science from Princeton University. She is an ACM fellow and an IEEE Fellow, and Winner of 2015's ACM Mark Weiser Award.