Yang Shao-Horn, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Professor Shao-Horn has focused on understanding and tuning reaction rates at interfaces in the fields of energy storage, catalysis, and sustainable energy. Her work has informed the industrial designs of batteries and fuel cells for transportation, contributed to university spinoffs and influenced international energy research and policies. She has pioneered the use of electronic/phononic structures to develop guiding principles of kinetics, ion mobility and dynamics to enhance properties, functions and performance. Her group reported new design principles for making catalysts more efficient and durable, paving the way for affordable production of green and sustainable fuels/chemicals including reduction of water, carbon dioxide or nitrogen. More recently, her work combines automated experimentation with machine learning (ML) to accelerate battery electrolyte discovery. The closed-loop framework employs robotic platforms for high-throughput synthesis and characterization of liquid and polymer electrolytes. These data are correlated with used to train ML models that predict ionic conductivity and interface stability, and inform subsequent experimental designs through active learning. Such work had led to discovery of novel electrolytes with unprecedented conductivity and strategies for electrolyte designs to enable advanced battery technologies.