Yangying Zhu, a rising star who joined the UC Santa Barbara Mechanical Engineering Department in 2019, has been promoted to associate professor, which includes tenure for the innovative young scientist. Zhu’s research is focused on thermal science for sustainability. Translating that, she says, “We engineer materials and structures to manipulate heat and mass transport for improved efficiency and reliability in electronic and energy devices.”
She passed credit for her promotion to those around her, saying, “I am grateful to my students and postdocs who have taken small steps with me during the past six years. I am also thankful to my mentors and colleagues at UCSB, who are always there to offer advice and support. UCSB is a remarkable institution with exceptional people and inspiring role models.”
After earning her PhD at MIT in 2017, Zhu spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University before coming to UCSB. Her research focuses on using thermo-fluid engineering approaches for electronics, water, and sustainable energy solutions. Her work combines fundamental understanding in heat and mass transfer with novel materials fabrications and characterization capabilities to address challenges in energy storage, thermal management of electronics, water harvesting, and transmittance of respiratory diseases. She has made important contributions to her field’s understanding of using nanostructures to manipulate phase-change thermal transport. Zhu has also made important contributions to understanding microscale thermal effects in batteries. She pioneered the use of micro-Raman spectroscopy for in situ temperature sensing of battery electrodes and discovered that a heterogeneous temperature can cause highly detrimental lithium plating to occur by thermodynamically shifting the equilibrium potentials of battery electrodes.
In 2020, she received a $50,000 seed grant from UC Santa Barbara’s Institute for Energy Efficiency (IEE) for her innovative research on saltwater desalination. That same year, she received a prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) Early CAREER Award relating COVID-19, specifically to a study of the evaporation and propagation of respiratory droplets and aerosols under different temperatures and humidity conditions, key factors in the spread of the disease.
In 2021, she received the 2021 Pi Tau Sigma Gold Medal Award from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. The annual award, established in 1938, celebrates one individual’s outstanding contributions within his or her first ten years of earning a bachelor’s degree. She followed that up in 2023 by becoming of twenty-four people to receive a prestigious Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research. The program supports innovative research that benefits science and technology for the Department of Navy. Selection is based heavily on prior academic accomplishments and the potential for scientific breakthroughs, with awardees receiving $750,000 over three years to support their proposed research projects. Zsu studied flow boiling in microchannels, a promising cooling method for microchips and data centers, both of which experience enormous heat fluxes that need to be dissipated rapidly.
In 2024, Zsu received a two-year, $500,000 seed grant from the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) addressing the need for improved techniques for desalination seawater such that meeting the growing global need for increasingly scarce freshwater can be met without exacerbating the challenge of reducing atmospheric CO2, the main driver of climate change. The grant was provided as part of the inaugural Inspiring Generations of New Innovators to Impact Technologies in Energy (IGNIITE 2024), a new ARPA-E program focused on supporting early-career scientists and engineers to convert disruptive ideas into impactful energy technologies, with an eye to bringing promising technologies to market.
Recently, Zhu became a new mother, so for that and for her promotion, which recognizes her truly innovative research, teaching, and mentoring, we say, “Congratulations, Yangying.”