Dr. Shang Zhai is going to join the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, with joint appointment in the School of Earth Sciences, at Ohio State as an Assistant Professor in Summer 2022. He earned B.Eng. in Building Technology from Tsinghua University, China in 2014. Dr. Zhai obtained his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering (advisor: Pr. Arun Majumdar) and a Ph.D. Minor in Materials Science and Engineering (co-advisor: Pr. William Chueh) from Stanford University in 2020, partly supported by the Enlight Foundation Graduate Fellowship.

Dr. Zhai’s doctoral dissertation focused on materials and technoeconomics of thermochemical splitting of water and CO₂. He developed strategies to tune phase transformation of ferrites and achieved at least 5 times the water/CO2 splitting capacity of state-of-the-art materials, challenging the conventional wisdom about ferrites. He also identified critical performance metrics for producing carbon-free hydrogen that would be cost-competitive in the market.

Currently, Dr. Zhai is a visiting assistant professor at OSU to set up his research program. Dr. Zhai is also a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford working with Pr. Arun Majumdar, Pr. Matteo Cargnello, and Dr. Raghubir Gupta, and he aims to address the carbon deposition problem commonly found in thermal catalysis, using methane pyrolysis for hydrogen as a testbed. He is also working on direct air capture of CO₂.

Dr. Zhai is passionate about applying thermal sciences, materials chemistry, and reaction engineering to revolutionary energy technologies for a sustainable future. He is glad to have been the mentor of 2 undergraduate students and 8 graduate students from diverse backgrounds.