Xiao-Ying Yu, a distinguished scientist in the Materials Science and Technology Division of the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has recently been chosen for several prominent editorial roles. She was appointed to a three-year term on the editorial board of Results in Engineering, an open-access Elsevier journal, and as the guest editor of its special issue “Emerging Women Investigators in Engineering.” For the journal Frontiers in Chemistry, she was named a topic editor for advances in secondary ion mass spectrometry. She currently sits on the boards of six other journals.
In 2022, Yu joined ORNL to lead the Advanced Nuclear Materials group, which seeks to understand how damage affects the properties and performance of structural materials and components for fission and fusion reactors and other extreme environments.
Before coming to ORNL, Yu served as chief engineer at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory for two years and, prior, senior scientist for 14 years. A pioneer of many chemical and atmospheric discoveries, she won a 2014 R&D 100 award and Federal Laboratory Consortium Technology Transfer award for a vacuum-based analytical instrument for molecular imaging of liquid surfaces and interfaces in native and working environments.
Yu has worked as an associate professor at Colorado State University and postdoctoral fellow at CSU and Brookhaven National Laboratory. The daughter of two chemists, she lived in China until starting graduate school at the University of Michigan, where she earned her doctorate in physical chemistry in 2001.
She holds three patents; another eight are pending. An award-winning mentor, she has authored four books, three book chapters and more than 120 peer-reviewed papers. She is a member of the American Vacuum Society, American Chemical Society, American Nuclear Society and ASTM International (formerly known as the American Society for Testing and Materials) for which she helps set standards for per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also known as “forever chemicals.” — Dawn Levy
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.
