Evelyn Wang
Evelyn Ning-Yi Wang is an American mechanical engineer and academic who is the Vice President for Energy and Climate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is the Ford Professor of Mechanical Engineering. She is also the director of the Device Research Laboratory at MIT. Topics in her research include heat transfer, ultrahydrophobicity, solar energy and nanostructures.
Early life and education
Wang was born to a Taiwanese American family in New York in 1978. Her father, Kang L. Wang, is an engineering professor who emigrated from Taiwan to the US to attend graduate school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her mother, Edith Wang, was also a graduate student at MIT. After her father became a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, Wang grew up in Santa Monica, California, where she attended public school and traveled internationally as part of a youth orchestra.After high school, Wang graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a B.S. in mechanical engineering in 2000. Her two older brothers also attended MIT. She then earned her M.S. in mechanical engineering in 2001 and her Ph.D. in mechanical engineering in 2006 from Stanford University. Her dissertation, "Characterization of Microfabricated Two-Phase Heat Sinks for IC Cooling Applications," was jointly supervised by professors Thomas W. Kenny and Kenneth E. Goodson.
Career and research
After receiving her doctorate, Wang did postdoctoral research at Bell Labs before returning to MIT as a faculty member in 2007.Wang is particularly known for her research on solar-powered devices to extract drinkable water from the atmosphere. Scientific American and the World Economic Forum named her technology that produces water from air in an arid climate as one of the "Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2017". Her water extraction device, which she designed in collaboration with Omar M. Yaghi, has been compared to the moisture on the desert planet Tatooine in Star Wars. However, rather than using refrigeration to condense water vapor, it uses a metal–organic framework to trap water vapor in the night and then uses the heat from solar energy to release the water from the framework during the day. Her research group has also developed a solar powered desalination system in producing clean water.