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Zheng Yu, ‘rising star’ in chemical engineering from MIT, quits US for China
The researcher who specialises in wearable devices has taken up a position at Peking University
Dannie Pengin Beijing
Published: 9:00pm, 14 Jan 2026Updated: 6:13am, 15 Jan 2026
A leading young Chinese chemical engineer has left the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to return home to Peking University.
Zheng Yu recently completed her postdoctoral training in bioelectronics in the US but has now joined the Chinese university’s college of chemistry and molecular engineering as an assistant professor.
According to her Peking University webpage, Zheng is working on wearable and implantable electronic devices, such as smart bandages that are used to monitor health.
Her research focuses on special materials that allow electronic devices to understand the biological signals sent by the body.
Zheng graduated from Nankai University in Tianjin in 2017 before heading to Stanford University in the US for her PhD, where she worked with Zhenan Bao, a chemical engineer best known for her work in areas such as flexible electronics and electronic skin.
She has spent the past three years at MIT, where she was selected for the university’s rising stars programme in chemical engineering in 2022.
The following year her PhD won an award for young chemists sponsored by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry and the chemical multinational Solvay.
Zheng’s work has been published in leading academic journals, including Nature Energy, Science and the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
She has also received an award for excellence in graduate polymer research from the American Chemical Society, as well as a travel grant from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers.
China’s top-tier research institutions are increasingly becoming a magnet for rising academic stars who studied in leading Western universities.
Xie Zhenfei, an HIV vaccine researcher at Harvard University, joined the State Key Laboratory of Virology and Biosafety at Wuhan University in October.
Last March, nuclear physicist Liu Chang, formerly a research physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, left the US for a position at Peking University researching nuclear fusion. |
