Kyra Yap will join the MIT Chemical Engineering faculty as an assistant professor in the fall of 2027. Yap is currently a postdoctoral research fellow in the chemical engineering department at the University of California, Berkeley. Under the advisement of Professor Nitash Balsara, her research combines electrochemical, NMR, and x-ray techniques to investigate the mechanisms of ion transport in solid-state battery electrolytes.
Yap was named one of Forbes’ 30 under 30 for 2026, for her research “to make chemical products efficiently and sustainably, in part by turning waste byproducts back into valuable resources.”
Yap completed her Ph.D. in chemical engineering at Stanford University in 2025, where she was co-advised by Professor Thomas Jaramillo and Dr. Adam Nielander of the SLAC National Lab. At Stanford, she was a DARE Fellow and Chevron Energy Fellow. During her Ph.D. work, she investigated the diurnal performance of electrochemical solar fuels devices and developed tandem solar-driven electrochemical-thermal processes for the conversion of CO2 to liquid fuels. Outside of the lab, Yap has led numerous initiatives to promote participation in STEM, including founding the Stanford Summit Tahoma Expeditions Program in 2022. This program is an internship program running during the academic year, where high school students shadow Stanford researchers to learn about careers in STEM. To date, the program has connected over 60 high school students to the Stanford University community. Yap received her B.S. in chemical engineering from Rutgers University in 2020, performing undergraduate research in the laboratory of Professor G. Charles Dismukes, and her M.S. in chemical engineering from Stanford University in 2023. She was born and raised in Brisbane, Australia.