Evelyn Wang

Evelyn N. Wang is a mechanical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she is the Gail E. Kendall (1978) Professor of Mechanical Engineering, director of the Device Research Laboratory, and chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Topics in her research include heat transfer, ultrahydrophobicity, solar energy and nanostructures.
Research.
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.
Biography.
Wang is the daughter of Kang L. Wang, an electrical engineer who emigrated from Taiwan to the US to become a graduate student at MIT; her mother Edith Wang was also a Taiwanese graduate student at MIT, where both parents met one another. Her father became a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Wang grew up in Santa Monica, California, attending public school there and traveling internationally as part of a youth orchestra.
Like her parents and her two older brothers, Wang attended MIT herself, earning a bachelor's degree there in 2000. Her doctorate is from Stanford University in 2006. Her dissertation, "Characterization of Microfabricated Two-Phase Heat Sinks for IC Cooling Applications", was jointly supervised by Thomas W. Kenny and Kenneth E. Goodson.
Wang did postdoctoral research at Bell Labs before returning to MIT as a faculty member in 2007.
Awards and honors.
The ASME gave Wang their Gustus L. Larson Memorial Award in 2017; she is also a Fellow of the ASME. In 2018 she and co-author Omar M. Yaghi won the 8th Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water.