Guihua Yu is John J. McKetta Centennial Energy Chair Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Mechanical Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. He earned his Ph.D. degree from Harvard University after graduating from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) with the highest honor, followed by postdoctoral research at Stanford University. His research has broadly centered on nanomaterials innovation, particularly pioneering polymeric hydrogels for advanced energy, environment, and sustainability technologies. Yu has published ~400 scientific papers in many prominent journals with total citations ~130,000 and H-index ~210 (Google). Yu is an elected Member of European Academy of Sciences and Arts and New York Academy of Sciences, and Fellow of AAAS, MRS, RSC, IOP, IMMM and IAAM. He has been consistently ranked among one of the Top Highly Cited Researchers in both Materials Science and Chemistry fields by Web of Science. Yu currently serves as Executive Editor of ACS Materials Letters (a flagship materials science journal by ACS), and Associate Editor of Science Advances (AAAS) and EcoMat (Wiley), and as Advisory/Editorial Board Member of over 20 international scientific journals in chemistry and materials science.

He has been recognized with many notable awards and honors, including Global Prize for Innovation in Water (GPIW) Grand Discovery Prize, UAE Global Water Award, Blavatnik National Awards Honoree, Germany Falling Walls Science Breakthrough of the Year, UK RSC Horizon Prize, Norman Hackerman Award in Chemical Research, O’Donnell Award in Engineering by TAMEST, TMS Brimacombe Medalist Award, Polymer International-IUPAC Award for Creativity in Applied Polymer Science, US-DOE Early Career Award, U.S. NAE-FOE Fellow, Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, Sloan Research Fellow, MIT Technology Review ‘Top Innovators Under 35’.