Zhenpeng Yao

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Zhenpeng Yao

Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai

Zhenpeng Yao, associate professor, doctoral supervisor, and high-level young talent introduced from overseas. In 2018, he received his Ph.D. from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern University, where he studied under Professor Chris Wolverton, one of the founders of the first principles field. The following year, he joined the Alan Aspuru-Guzik group at the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University, which is at the top of the quantum chemistry, deep machine learning, and machine autonomy laboratory, for postdoctoral research. His research areas include high-energy electrode materials and electrolytes, solid-state ion conductors, two-dimensional materials, framework chemistry, chemical informatics, material design based on deep machine learning, and material genome research.

He proposed an anion redox electrochemical energy storage mechanism, which achieved a theoretical breakthrough in the development of high-energy-density lithium-ion batteries. This work was selected as an outstanding paper published in Nature Energy and reported by more than 20 government and news organizations including the U.S. Department of Energy. He has obtained relevant patents and was awarded the Outstanding Achievement Award by the American Chemical Energy Storage Association. In the field of framework materials, the first nanoporous material optimization design platform was built. With artificial intelligence and material genome as the core, the performance-guided organic metal framework machine autonomous design was creatively realized, and breakthroughs were made in multiple energy application fields. The work was published in Nature Machine Intelligence and reported by many news media such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science AAAS. In addition, the team also participated in the discovery of the correlation between the composition and structure of layered oxides represented by lithium cobalt oxide, solving the long-standing crystallographic problem - the problem of predicting the structure of layered materials, and laying the foundation for the accelerated development of high-performance electrode materials based on layered oxides. The work was published in Science. As the first/co-first/corresponding author, he has published more than 70 papers in top international journals such as Nature (2024), Science (2021), Nature Reviews Materials (2022), Nature Review Physics (2022), Nature Energy (2018), Nature Sustainability (2024), Nature Machine Intelligence (2021), Nature Communications (2024/2023/2022/2020/2019), Science Advances (2018), JACS (2020), Advanced Materials (2023/2022/2018), Angewandte Chemie (2024/2023/2022), Accounts of Chemical Research (2021), etc. He has been a reviewer for famous journals such as Science Advances, Nature Communications, Joule, Matter, Chemistry of Materials, etc.