Yang Shao-Horn

Yang Shao-Horn is an energy scientist who will leave the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after more than three decades to join Singapore's Nanyang Technological University (NTU) as Vice President of Research in January 2027, taking up NTU's highest faculty rank as a Distinguished University Professor. She is currently the JR East Professor of Engineering at MIT, with appointments in mechanical engineering, materials science and engineering, and chemistry, and her research focuses on materials for energy storage and conversion, including rechargeable lithium-ion and lithium-air batteries, as well as technologies for producing sustainable fuels and chemicals.

Born in Beijing, Shao-Horn earned her bachelor's degree in metallurgical and materials engineering from Beijing University of Technology in 1992 before moving to the US to pursue a PhD in the same discipline at Michigan Technological University, completed in 1998, where she chose lithium-ion batteries as her research field when the technology was still relatively new. After a stint as a staff scientist at battery maker Eveready, an initial rejection from a tenure-track position, and a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Condensed Matter Chemistry in Bordeaux, France, she joined MIT's faculty in 2002 and has remained there since, building a research career spanning electrochemistry, batteries, energy conversion and sustainable fuels. She was elected to the US National Academy of Engineering in 2018 and is a fellow of the US National Academy of Inventors. At NTU, she will oversee the university's research agenda and help shape its strategic research priorities.

Professor Yang Shao-Horn studies materials for electrochemical and photoelectrochemical energy storage and conversion. Her research exploits physical and materials chemistries to understand and control the kinetics and dynamics for storing electrons, critical to enable clean energy and mitigate climate change. She develops universal design principles of materials to enhance functions in a number of applications, from sustainable chemicals and fuels to rechargeable lithium-ion and lithium-air batteries.

After completing her PhD in 1998, Shao-Horn joined the Eveready Battery Company in Westlake, Ohio as a staff scientist, researching high-voltage spinel materials for lithium-ion batteries, iron disulfide for lithium primary batteries, and alkaline zinc-manganese dioxide batteries, before leaving in 2000 for an NSF International Research Fellowship with Claude Delmas at the Institute of Condensed Matter Chemistry in Bordeaux. She has pioneered the tuning of oxide electronic structure to develop active catalysts for oxygen reduction and evolution, showing that the antibonding orbital filling of surface transition-metal cations controls catalytic activity in a volcano-shaped dependence, and that increasing metal-oxygen covalency enhances oxygen-evolution activity up to a point beyond which it reduces oxide stability — work that has also informed understanding of electrolyte degradation in lithium-ion batteries and selective oxidation of hydrocarbon fuels.

She has advised roughly 90 students and postdoctoral associates at MIT, about 30 of whom have gone on to faculty positions at institutions including the University of Michigan, MIT, Boston College, and Cornell, as well as academic posts in Europe and Asia, and has lectured widely in academia and industry and at venues including the World Economic Forum in Davos. Her honors include the Charles W. Tobias Young Investigator Award (2008), the Royal Society of Chemistry's Faraday Medal (2018) — the first woman to receive it since its 1977 inception — the Technical University of Munich's Dr. Karl Wamsler Innovation Award (2020, also a first for a woman), and a Humboldt Research Prize from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. She has been a member of the US National Academy of Engineering since 2018 and 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, and serves as senior editor of the American Chemical Society's Accounts of Materials Research.