He Shan, a recent Ph.D. graduate from Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s School of Mechanical Engineering, has been selected as a 2026 Stanford Energy Postdoctoral Fellow-one of only ten fellows chosen worldwide for this year’s cohort.

The fellowship annually recruits up to 10 outstanding early-career energy researchers worldwide, offering up to three years of full funding, interdisciplinary faculty mentorship and access to Stanford’s advanced research facilities.

He Shan is rethinking the heating systems inside buildings. During his joint PhD at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the National University of Singapore, Shan explored systems that extract moisture from air, even in dry climates. At Stanford, he will design moisture heat pumps – an emergent technology designed to capture moisture and release heat with potentially much higher efficiency than conventional heat pumps. Shan will also strengthen their ability to produce clean water as a byproduct. His faculty mentors are Meagan Mauter in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, and Carlos Diaz-Marin (an alumnus of the fellowship’s third cohort) and Ilenia Battiato – both in the Department of Energy Science & Engineering.

“The fellowship is built on a simple premise: Tough challenges, like the energy transition, cannot be solved in isolation,” said Yi Cui, professor of materials science and engineering, who founded the program in 2022 and is its faculty director. “By design, our fellows come from a wide range of disciplines, and cross-pollination happens on campus.”

The fellowship convenes and supports exceptional early-career energy researchers to take on challenges across the spectrum of the global energy transformation. Each fellow works with at least two faculty mentors from different disciplines, and several have three. Additionally, two fellows will work with scientists at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. This structure allows for integrative conversations that no single academic department could generate on its own.

The fellowship, which is hosted by the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability’s Precourt Institute for Energy, provides scholars up to three years of funding – a rarity in postdoctoral research. This gives fellows a runway to pursue systems-level questions spanning policy, technical, and societal domains, rather than narrowing their focus to fit grant cycles or department expectations.

Original link: https://energy.stanford.edu/news/stanford-energy-postdoctoral-fellowship-welcomes-10-new-fellows