Maria Kai Yee Chan is an American

materials scientist Materials science is an interdisciplinary field of researching and discovering materials. Materials engineering is an engineering field of finding uses for materials in other fields and industries. The intellectual origins of materials scien ...

at the

Argonne National Laboratory Argonne National Laboratory is a Federally funded research and development centers, federally funded research and development center in Lemont, Illinois, Lemont, Illinois, United States. Founded in 1946, the laboratory is owned by the United Sta ...

. Her research involves the applications of

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...

nanomaterials Nanomaterials describe, in principle, chemical substances or materials of which a single unit is sized (in at least one dimension) between 1 and 100 nm (the usual definition of nanoscale). Nanomaterials research takes a materials science ...

and

renewable energy Renewable energy (also called green energy) is energy made from renewable resource, renewable natural resources that are replenished on a human lifetime, human timescale. The most widely used renewable energy types are solar energy, wind pow ...

, including the prediction of material properties and the retrieval of data from the published literature. Chan became interested in physics at age 11 after reading a book about relativity. She has a bachelor's degree in physics and applied mathematics from the

University of California, Los Angeles The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Its academic roots were established in 1881 as a normal school the ...

, and a Ph.D. in physics from the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

. Her 2009 dissertation, ''Atomistic and ab initio prediction and optimization of thermoelectric and photovoltaic properties'', was jointly supervised by Gerbrand Ceder and

John Joannopoulos John D. Joannopoulos (born April 26, 1947) is an American physicist, focused in condensed matter theory. He is currently the Francis Wright Davis Professor of Physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an Elected Member of the National Acad ...

. She joined the Argonne National Laboratory as a postdoctoral researcher before continuing there as a staff researcher. She was elected as a

Fellow of the American Physical Society The American Physical Society honors members with the designation ''Fellow'' for having made significant accomplishments to the field of physics. The following lists are divided chronologically by the year of designation. * List of fellows of the ...

(APS) in 2024, after a nomination from the APS Topical Group on Energy Research and Applications, "for contributions to methodological innovations, developments, and demonstrations toward the integration of computational modeling and experimental characterization to improve the understanding and design of renewable energy materials".

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* {{DEFAULTSORT:Chan, Maria Year of birth missing (living people) Living people American materials scientists Women materials scientists and engineers University of California, Los Angeles alumni Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni Argonne National Laboratory people Fellows of the American Physical Society