Katherine Yan

Katherine Yan is a PhD candidate in the chemical engineering department in the Jaramillo Group. She is funded by the NSF Graduate Research Fellows Program and conducts research with the Liquid Sunlight Alliance DOE solar fuels hub. Katherine works on investigating catalyst material degradation during electrochemical CO2 conversion using inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry. She is also working on a tandem device in which the products from carbon dioxide conversion in a photovoltaic-driven electrolyzer are fed into a photothermal reactor to produce higher order carbon products. Her research inspired her interests in carbon management and how policy can play a role in enabling the scaleup of emerging renewable energy technologies.

Katherine was raised in the Twin Cities, MN area. She attended Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH, for her undergrad, where she majored in chemical engineering and minored in political science. She was awarded the Beckman Scholars Fellowship to conduct research on developing antifouling coatings for hernia mesh implants. Outside of research, Katherine serves on the Dean’s Graduate Student Advisory Council, where she has worked on the DEI and PhD Subcommittees. She is passionate about increasing accessibility to STEM and has been awarded grants for her outreach efforts in piloting a STEM summer camp for middle school girls in her hometown and workshops in collaboration with the Saturday Tutoring Program of Cleveland. She is currently a mentor for Future Advancers of Science and Technology (FAST), where she mentors high school students in San Jose on year-long research projects to enter a science fair.