August 20, 2025 New Mechanical Engineering Faculty: So Yeon Kim Written By: Caitlin Scott Departments: Mechanical Engineering Categories: Faculty So Yeon Kim will join the Department of Mechanical Engineering as an Assistant Professor in January 2026! So Yeon’s research seeks to understand and engineer materials’ damage tolerance under open-system reactions such as electrochemical or nuclear processes. Examples of applications include battery electrodes and nuclear fusion reactor walls, which experience huge internal stresses from these reactions yet must endure for years in energy-infrastructure settings. To this end, she will establish an electrochemical-mechanical lab integrating high-throughput atomistic modeling, data-driven property mapping, and autonomous chemical synthesis and structural characterization. So Yeon earned her Sc.D. in Materials Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2023. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT. Photo of So Yeon Kim by Gretchen Ertl.