Dr. Y. Shirley Meng, recently named as the new Editor-in-Chief of MRS Energy & Sustainability journal, received her PhD in advanced materials for micro- and nanosystems from the Singapore-Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Alliance in 2005, after which she worked as a postdoctoral research fellow and research scientist at MIT. Meng is currently a professor of nanoengineering and materials science at University of California San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and holds the Zable Endowed Chair in Energy Technologies. She is also the founding director of the Sustainable Power and Energy Center at UCSD (spec.ucsd.edu). Her research group, Laboratory for Energy Storage and Conversion (LESC), focuses on functional nano- and microscale materials for energy storage and conversion. More recent programs include the design, synthesis, processing and operando characterization of energy storage materials in advanced rechargeable batteries; new electrode and electrolyte materials for lithium and sodium ion batteries; and advanced long-life, low-cost batteries for grid large scale storage.
Meng has received numerous awards for her research and leadership, including the National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2011), the UCSD Chancellor’s Interdisciplinary Collaboratories Award (2013), the Science Award in Electrochemistry by BASF and Volkswagen (2014), the Charles W. Tobias Young Investigator Award of the Electrochemical Society (2016), the IUMRS-Singapore Young Scientist Award (2017), the International Coalition for Energy Storage and Innovation (ICESI) Inaugural Young Career Award (2018), the ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces Young Investigator Award (2018), and the International Battery Association (IBA) Research Award (2019). She is one of ten national finalists for the prestigious Blavatnik Award for 2018 and 2019. Meng is also the author and co-author of more than 180 peer-reviewed journal articles, two book chapters and six patents.
