November 24, 2025 Ying Li recognized with 2025 Materials Today Rising Star award Written By: Caitlin Scott Departments: Mechanical Engineering Categories: Awards|Faculty Mechanical Engineering Associate Professor Ying Li has received the 2025 Materials Today Rising Star Award in the area of Materials Data Science & AI! The Materials Today Rising Star Awards recognize researchers in materials science and engineering who have demonstrated exceptional talent and promise, and who have shown significant potential to become future leaders in their field. These researchers have been selected not only for the outstanding quality of their work, but also for the real impact their contributions have had in their fields of study. Li shared about his future research goals with Materials Today: My future research aims to integrate multiscale modeling, data science, and Agentic AI to establish predictive and interpretable frameworks for polymer and soft-matter design. I seek to develop physics-informed and explainable AI models that bridge molecular structures with macroscopic properties, accelerating the discovery of sustainable, recyclable, and manufacturable materials. By building self-evolving materials databases and coupling them with experimental and simulation data, my goal is to enable autonomous materials innovation while training the next generation of researchers fluent in both materials science and data science. Learn more about the awards here.