PCI awarded Shu Yang, The Joseph Bordogna Professor and chair of Materials Science and Engineering, with the Inventor of the Year Award for the 2023 Fiscal Year in December for her innovative engineering solutions, which span agriculture, building cooling and heating and reversible adhesives.
In this Penn Today article, Yang explains how her inventions begin with changes on a fundamental level that can then grow into scalable and impactful products.
Yang employs kirigami, the Asian art of cutting and folding materials that is similar to origami, to mimic nature’s connection between structure and function in her own inventions.
As part of a $2.2million, multi-university U.S. Department of Energy project, Yang is currently using kirigami to redesign water collectors to be used in wood desiccation, a process required before wood can be burned to generate heat and power.
“I continually ask myself what kind of research and what kinds of new technologies will make the biggest societal impact?” Yang said in the article.
Read more here.