Evelyn N. Wang is MIT’s inaugural Vice President for Energy and Climate and leads the MIT Climate Project. Appointed by President Sally Kornbluth in January

2025, Dr. Wang assumed the role after serving the nation as the Senate- confirmed director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E)

from 2023-2025, where she led the agency’s development, launch, and execution of high-risk, high-reward energy research and development programs.

The Ford Professor of Engineering and former head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Dr. Wang earned her MIT undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering before completing her SM and PhD at Stanford. After a postdoctoral appointment at Bell Labs, she joined the MIT faculty, becoming an internationally recognized leader in phase-change heat transfer on nano- structured surfaces and in high-efficiency energy and water systems. Her work on solar cells that convert heat into focused light was named to MIT Technology Review’s 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2017, and her device for extracting fresh water from air in arid environments was selected by Scientific American and the World Economic Forum as one of 2017’s top emerging technologies. Outside of MIT, Dr. Wang serves on the board of the Singapore Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR); the Monitoring Committee for AI², the Agency for Research and Innovation in Portugal; and the Academic Advisory Group for the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (MassCEC).

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Dr. Wang is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (2025); a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2021); a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2023); and a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (2015), which awarded her the 2017 Gustus L. Larson Memorial Award for outstanding achievement.

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