Mission & History

Zhenan Bao joined Stanford University in 2004. She is currently a K.K. Lee Professor in Chemical Engineering, and with courtesy appointments in Chemistry and Material Science and Engineering. She was the Department Chair of Chemical Engineering from 2018-2022. She founded the Stanford Wearable Electronics Initiative (eWEAR) and is the current faculty director. She is also an affiliated faculty member of Precourt Institute, Woods Institute, ChEM-H and Bio-X. Professor Bao received her Ph.D. degree in Chemistry from The University of Chicago in 1995 and joined the Materials Research Department of Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies. She became a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff in 2001. Professor Bao currently has close to 700 refereed publications and more than 80 US patents with a Google Scholar H-index 198. Bao is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Inventors. Bao was elected a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Science in 2021. She is a Fellow of AAAS, ACS, MRS, SPIE, ACS POLY and ACS PMSE.

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 (Japan) in 1994. He is the Robert Porter Patterson Professor in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and served as the Director of the Sustainable Energy Program. 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 was the Chair of the US Sections of the Combustion Institute and serves as an Associate Editor of AIAA Journal and Combustion Science and Technology. He has received many awards including three times of the Distinguished Paper Award 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 the 2021 Propellants & Combustion Award from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), the Alfred C. Egerton Gold Medal (2022) from the Combustion Institute, and the 2022 Distinguished Teacher Award from School of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University. 

Ju Li is the Battelle Energy Alliance Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering and a professor in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering. His group investigates the mechanical, electrochemical, and transport behaviors of materials as well as novel means of energy storage and conversion. Before coming to MIT, Li was a professor at Ohio State University and the University of Pennsylvania. He is an elected Fellow of the Materials Research Society and the American Physical Society. He has received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, a Materials Research Society Outstanding Young Investigator Award, and an MIT Technology Review TR35 Award. He earned a BS in physics from the University of Science and Technology of China, and a PhD in nuclear science from MIT.

Yang Shao-Horn studies materials for electrochemical and photoelectrochemical energy storage and conversion, which is centered on examining the influence of surface chemistry and electronic structures of thin films and nanomaterials on lithium storage and catalytic activity of small molecules of energy consequence, and applying fundamental understanding in reaction mechanisms to design new materials for lithium storage and electrocatalysis of oxygen reduction, water splitting, methanol oxidation and CO2 reduction.

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 joint 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 has a faculty appointment at the Princeton Institute of International and Regional Studies, Princeton University. He is also a Visiting Chair Professor of the Center for Social Research, Peking University. His main areas of interest are social stratification, demography, statistical methods, Chinese studies, and sociology of science. 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. Xie joined the faculty Aug. 1, 2015, 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. 

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.