Yan Yao is Cullen Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and co-Director of Power Electronics, Microgrids & Subsea Electrical Systems Center at the University of Houston. Yao is a Fellow of Royal Society of Chemistry (UK), a Senior Member of National Academy of Inventors and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He received his Ph.D. degree in materials science and engineering from UCLA in 2008. After working as a senior scientist at Polyera Corporation and a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University with Prof. Yi Cui, he became a faculty member of the University of Houston in 2012. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2017 and Full Professor in 2020. Yao has been leading research on the fundamental study of energy storage materials and devices, spanning from solid-state batteries for electric vehicles to multivalent-ion batteries and aqueous batteries for grid energy storage. He has authored more than 110 journal articles with 25,000 citations, and holds 10 US patents. He received the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award (2013), UH Teaching Excellence Award (2016), UH Research Excellence Award (2018), Top 1% Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher (2018), Scialog Collaborative Innovation Award (2018 and 2020), and Cullen College of Engineering Professorship (2020).