At Stanford University, Yi Cui is the director of the Precourt Institute for Energy, co-director of the StorageX Initiative, professor of materials science and engineering and of photon science at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. He earned his bachelor’s degree in chemistry in 1998 from the University of Science & Technology of China and his PhD in chemistry from Harvard University in 2002. Cui was a Miller Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley from 2002 to 2005 before joining the Stanford faculty. He has founded five companies to commercialize technologies from his lab: Amprius Inc., 4C Air Inc., EEnotech Inc., LifeLabs Design Inc. and EnerVenue Inc.
A preeminent researcher of nanotechnologies for better batteries and other sustainability technologies, Cui has published more than 530 studies and is one of the world’s most cited scientists. He is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Materials Research Society, and the Royal Society of Chemistry. He is an executive editor of Nano Letters and co-director of the Battery 500 Consortium.
Cui’s honors include Global Energy Prize (2021), Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award (2021), Materials Research Society Medal (2020) and Blavatnik National Laureate (2017).