Stanford Energy Postdoctoral Fellowship welcomes 10 new fellows

The Stanford Energy Postdoctoral Fellowship has accepted ten new fellows as its fourth cohort, drawn from eight universities in three countries. Half are women. All are stars in their class who hold recent PhDs or will complete them this spring. 

“The fellowship is built on a simple premise: Tough challenges, like the energy transition, cannot be solved in isolation,” said Yi Cui, professor of materials science and engineering, who founded the program in 2022 and is its faculty director. “By design, our fellows come from a wide range of disciplines, and cross-pollination happens on campus.”  

The fellowship convenes and supports exceptional early-career energy researchers to take on challenges across the spectrum of the global energy transformation. Each fellow works with at least two faculty mentors from different disciplines, and several have three. Additionally, two fellows will work with scientists at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. This structure allows for integrative conversations that no single academic department could generate on its own. 

The fellowship, which is hosted by the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability’s Precourt Institute for Energy, provides scholars up to three years of funding – a rarity in postdoctoral research. This gives fellows a runway to pursue systems-level questions spanning policy, technical, and societal domains, rather than narrowing their focus to fit grant cycles or department expectations.

“This fourth cohort expands the breadth of the fellowship,” said Audrey Yau, the fellowship's director. “The new fellows’ projects span a range of topics from sustainable agriculture to mobility, but many overlap. They can inspire each other to think more broadly about the connections and applications of their work to various areas.”

To support interaction, the program organizes routine opportunities for fellows to connect, including quarterly leadership lunches and an annual month-long research intensive. Monthly “lab crawls” most frequently bring fellows together, and seeing work in progress often prompts new questions and collaborations. 

“These fellows tackle different problems, but they share a common commitment to significantly improving our world. That kind of goal requires systems-level thinking,” said William Chueh, director of the Precourt Institute and professor of materials science and engineering. The fellows, Chueh said, will advance the Doerr School’s mission to create high-impact solutions to urgent planetary challenges. In all of its programs, the Precourt Institute works with researchers and educators across campus. The postdoctoral program is made possible by the generosity of several philanthropists. 

Mobility 

Distinct from transportation, mobility is the broader study of how sustainably, easily, and fairly humans can move through the world. This year, two fellows are taking on mobility – a newer focus area for the fellowship, and it coincides with the launch of the Precourt Institute’s Sustainable Mobility Center. 

Jack Collison (BA ‘20, MS ‘21) approaches energy systems and mobility as an economist. He completed his PhD in economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison this year. As more people switch to electric vehicles, oil companies must decide whether to compete more aggressively or leave the market. Collison studies how these choices ripple out to affect fuel prices, carbon dioxide emissions, and EV adoption. At Stanford University, he will combine economic modeling with computer science to study those dynamics. Then, he will show how the outcomes of these models can help policymakers, industry stakeholders, and consumers make better decisions. Collison's mentors are economist Ignacio Cuesta, and environmental social scientists Shanjun Li and Hunt Allcott. 

Zhe Fu explores how artificial intelligence could improve complex systems shaped by human behavior, such as traffic networks. During her PhD at UC-Berkeley, Fu helped lead one of the largest automated vehicle field experiments to date. At Stanford, she will analyze traffic patterns and human driving behavior to build predictive tools and design targeted interventions to reduce congestion, fuel use, emissions, and electricity demand. Fu aims to make mobility systems more efficient, but expects these strategies could eventually apply to any complex system shaped by human decisions, from urban infrastructure to energy grids. Fu will work with mechanical engineer Eric Darve and aeronautics and astronautics scientist Marco Pavone. Pavone is also part of the leadership team of the Sustainable Mobility Center.

Energy efficiency

He Shan is rethinking the heating systems inside buildings. During his joint PhD at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the National University of Singapore, Shan explored systems that extract moisture from air, even in dry climates. At Stanford, he will design moisture heat pumps – an emergent technology designed to capture moisture and release heat with potentially much higher efficiency than conventional heat pumps. Shan will also strengthen their ability to produce clean water as a byproduct. His faculty mentors are Meagan Mauter in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, and Carlos Diaz-Marin (an alumnus of the fellowship’s third cohort) and Ilenia Battiato – both in the Department of Energy Science & Engineering.

Eugene “Jane” Park explores how energy is transmitted and lost within the materials that make up electronic devices. During her PhD at MIT, she developed methods to study and modify the atomic structure at the boundaries where different materials meet, showing how changes at these interfaces can improve how energy moves between them. At Stanford, Park will engineer the material interfaces inside electronics used for AI and high-performance computing (which are often very energy-intensive) to improve efficiency. Because every electronic device has these interfaces, tiny energy losses occur everywhere and quickly add up, giving her work applications across many technologies. Park will work with two faculty members new to the fellowship: applied physicist Alfred Zong and materials scientist Kate Reidy.

Agriculture

In her PhD at UC-Berkeley, Cynthia “Cindy” Gee studied how plants could use sunlight more efficiently to increase crop yields. She then joined biotechnology company Sound Agriculture, where she learned tools designed to reduce how much synthetic fertilizer farmers need to apply to crops. At Stanford, Gee will explore ways to eliminate the need for synthetic fertilizers altogether. Some plants, like legumes, naturally form partnerships with soil microbes to get nitrogen. Gee will work on engineering other crops to have this same ability, helping them grow with less or no fertilizer. Gee’s faculty mentors are Ellen Yeh in the School of Medicine’s Department of Microbiology & Immunology and mechanical engineer Sindy Tang. 

Renewable energy

After earning a PhD at Rice University, Yigao Yuan joined Jennifer Dionne’s lab at Stanford last year to explore a new path to fusion energy. The key to fusion is getting the nuclei inside two hydrogen isotopes (the fuel) to merge – a process that releases an enormous amount of energy. This is what powers the sun. Yuan is investigating the materials for lattice confinement fusion, in which crowding the hydrogen fuel into a metal lattice at the atomic level could increase the probability of the nuclei colliding and fusing. Yuan will borrow techniques from bioengineering to view the atomic level and watch how these fuel atoms behave in real time. Yuan, officially starting the postdoctoral fellowship this year, will continue working with materials scientist Dionne and with bioengineer Wah Chiu.

Energy storage

At UCLA, Bo Liu’s PhD research focuses on batteries that use water-based electrolytes instead of the flammable solvents used in conventional lithium-ion batteries. Water-based batteries offer a safer and cheaper way to store large amounts of electricity for the grid. However, water can corrode internal battery components and shorten battery life. At Stanford, Liu will develop protective surface coatings to help these batteries last longer. She also plans to explore how these approaches could extend to other metals and battery chemistries. Liu will work with physicist Steven Chu and Yan-Kai Tzeng at SLAC.

Xintong Yuan's PhD work at UCLA examined lithium metal batteries, which can store more energy than widely used lithium-ion batteries. However, these batteries degrade more quickly than lithium-ion batteries and are more prone to internal short circuits and overheating. At Stanford, Yuan will dissect how electrolytes break down during electrochemical operation. Then, she will demonstrate how to control this decomposition for safer and higher-energy battery storage. Chemical engineer Zhenan Bao and Cui, who is also the faculty director of the Stanford Sustainability Accelerator, will advise Yuan.

Cole Fincher explores how batteries fail. During his PhD at MIT, Fincher discovered that charging weakens solid-state batteries, which use a solid material rather than a liquid to move ionic charge within the battery. Compared with liquid electrolytes used in lithium- and sodium-metal batteries, these solid materials are more stable and could enable batteries that store much more energy. At Stanford, Fincher will study how chemical and mechanical interactions develop inside solid-state batteries from the atomic scale up, with the goal of engineering tougher battery materials. These advances could support energy storage applications across mobility, building, and electric power sectors alike. Fincher will work with Chueh and mechanical engineer Wendy Gu.

Shiyuan Zhou studies the chemical reactions inside batteries that are often impossible to observe directly. He earned a joint PhD from Xiamen University and Argonne National Laboratory, where he developed new ways to image these reactions as they occur. At Stanford, Zhou will build a framework to create real-time videos of these reactions under different temperatures and pressures. He will focus on solid-state and lithium-metal batteries, which play a central role in the energy transition, but plans to provide design principles for engineers working on all types of battery energy storage. Zhou’s mentors are Cui, Chiu, and Xueli Zheng at SLAC.

The Stanford Energy Postdoctoral Fellowship will accept up to 10 fellows each year. Applications for the fifth cohort open July 1. The deadline for completing the application is Oct. 1. Final decisions will be made by Jan. 1, 2027. The fifth cohort will arrive on campus during summer 2027.