Dr Evelyn Wang

Dr Evelyn Wang is MIT's Vice President for Energy and Climate. Appointed by President Sally Kornbluth in January 2025, Dr Wang assumed the role after serving the nation as the Senate-confirmed director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) from 2023-2025, where she led the Agency's development, launch, and execution of high-risk, high-reward energy research and development programs.

The Ford Professor of Engineering at MIT, Dr Wang earned her undergraduate degree at MIT in mechanical engineering, then returned to her home state of California to attend Stanford University for her SM and PhD. Following a postdoctoral stint at Bell Labs, she joined the MIT faculty, where she built a record of advanced innovations. An internationally recognised leader in phase change heat transfer, Dr Wang developed technologies for thermal management, energy conversion and storage, and water harvesting and purification.

The technologies she and her colleagues developed draw on fundamental micro- and nanoscale heat and mass transfer research with innovative materials and device design. Foreign Policy Magazine recognized her water extraction work by naming Dr Wang as its 2017 Global ReThinker, and in 2018, the work won the Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water, which honours water-related scientific innovation.

As director of the Device Research Lab, Dr Wang held several professorships, ultimately being named Ford Professor of Engineering. In 2018, she became department head of MIT Mechanical Engineering, a role she held until she left the Institute to lead ARPA-E.

Dr Wang is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineering.