The UCSB Materials Department congratulates alumna Wennie Wang, Ph.D. (’18), on receiving the 2025 American Physical Society Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award, which recognizes outstanding early-career achievements by a woman physicist.

Wang, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin, is honored for her pioneering contributions to materials science, particularly her research on defective transition metal oxides for energy sustainability, as well as her leadership and commitment to broadening participation in computational materials science.

Her research group uses first-principles computational methods to understand and engineer the electronic, optical, and transport properties of materials for next-generation energy and electronic technologies.

Wang earned her Ph.D. from UCSB in 2018 under Chris Van de Walle and completed postdoctoral research at the University of Chicago.