Rate My Professor Samuel Mao

Professor Samuel Mao is Senior Director of Masdar Institute and Professor of Practice in Mechanical Engineering at Khalifa University. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. His career includes roles as a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, adjunct professor and director of the clean energy engineering laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley, honorary professor at the University of Queensland in Australia, honorary founding director of the Institute of New Energy, and adjunct professor at North China Electric Power University in China.

Professor Mao has published more than 160 refereed journal articles and is an inventor of over 80 patents in the U.S. and abroad, with his work receiving approximately 45,000 citations according to Google Scholar. His research centers on sustainable energy technologies and advanced functional materials, including the development of disorder-engineering concepts leading to high-efficiency nanocrystal photocatalysts published in Science, and leadership of an international team that demonstrated the world’s first hybrid electric heavy-duty trucks, resulting in a spinoff company. He has delivered more than 100 invited lectures at international conferences and universities worldwide. He has served as a technical committee member, program review panelist, research grant reviewer, and national laboratory observer for the U.S. Department of Energy. He co-chaired the Materials Research Society annual meeting in spring 2011 and the International Conference on Clean Energy in 2012 and 2017. He is a recipient of the R&D 100 Award for innovation in clean technology and the UC Berkeley MEGSC faculty teaching award. His research interests include sustainable energy production, storage, and utilization, as well as advanced functional materials for sustainability applications.