Bilge Yıldız

Bilge Yıldız is a Professor of Nuclear Science, and Materials Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She develops new materials for energy conversion in harsh environments. These include solid oxide fuel cells and corrosion-resistant materials for nuclear energy regeneration.

Early life and education Yıldız was born to two teachers in İzmir, Turkey, who made her appreciate education and hard work. She became interested in science and engineering whilst at primary school and chose to attend the science specialist school in her home town. She returned to MIT as the Norman C. Rasmussen Assistant Professor in 2007. Yıldız leads the Laboratory for Electrochemical Interfaces at MIT. Her research considers how surfaces respond to harsh conditions, including high temperatures, reactive gases, mechanical stress and applied fields. By studying the reaction and transport kinetics in fuel cells or cells designed for water splitting, Bilgie hopes to suppress the corrosion of these materials. In nuclear reactions, metal structures that are critical to safety can degrade due to hydrogen penetration. Hydrogen infiltration can make metals mechanically weak. Most of these materials are polycrystalline, and the grain boundaries between adjacent tiny crystals can impact a material's response to stress. She has demonstrated that dislocations in an atomic lattice can speed up the transport of oxygen ions, increasing the rate of diffusion in fuel cells and oxygen separation membranes.

Her recent work has considered the mechanisms responsible for oxygen reduction kinetics in perovskite oxides, as well as investigating interface chemistries in high power density solid batteries. Yıldız identified that strontium cobaltite can switch between a metallic and semiconducting state using a small voltage, which means that it could be used in non-volatile memory. Yıldız has identified the effects of elastic strain, oxygen pressure and dislocations on the degradation and reactivity of hybrid materials. In 2014, Yıldız was awarded tenure at MIT.

Awards and honours Her awards and honours include;

2006 Argonne National Laboratory Pace Setter Award 2011 MISTI Global Seed Fund 2012 National Science Foundation CAREER Award 2012 Charles W. Tobias Young Investigator Award 2018 American Ceramic Society Ross Coffin Purdy Award 2021 Fellow of the American Physical Society "for innovative contributions to understanding and manipulating ionic defects and charge transport at electro-chemo-mechanically coupled oxide interfaces and devices"

Selected publications Her publications include;