CU Engineering Professor Named One of World’s Top 35 Young Innovators

CU-Boulder assistant professor Ronggui Yang holds a flexible polymer material that could be used as a thermal ground plane for cooling in electronic devices.

Photo courtesy of the University of Colorado

An assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder has been named one of the world’s top 35 young innovators.

Ronggui Yang, 34, will be honored in the September/October issue of Technology Review, a magazine published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.

Known as the TR35, the group consists of 35 scientists and technologists under the age of 35 whose work is changing the fields of medicine, computing, communications, electronics, nanotechnology and energy. Yang works in micro- and nanotechnology for energy conversion, thermal management in electronic devices and nanostructured materials.

“Professor Ronggui Yang’s fundamental work in thermal processes, coupled with his work in energy conversion, plays an important role in the CU Energy Initiative and will help us define a path forward as we move into the new-energy age,” said CU Chancellor G.P. “Bud” Peterson.

Yang is a key figure in several large research grants awarded to CU-Boulder, including a recently announced $1.5-million contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

The DARPA project will explore new micro- and nanotechnologies that significantly improve thermal management in electronic devices—one of the critical constraints on today's consumer and military electronic systems.

Yang also has an ongoing grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research to research energy harvesting and storage systems, including new thermoelectric materials with nanoscale components that could convert waste heat from engines and high-powered electronics to boost fuel efficiency.

Yang received his doctorate in mechanical engineering from MIT and joined the faculty at CU-Boulder in January 2006. He is a member of the DARPA Focus Center on Nanoscale Science and Technology for Micro/Nano-Electromechanical Transducers and the National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center for Extreme Ultraviolet Science and Technology.

The TR35 will be honored at MIT’s Emerging Technologies Conference Sept. 23 to Sept. 25 in Cambridge, Mass. Yang has been invited to serve on an energy panel and present an overview of how his research will impact global energy use.