When So Yeon Kim tells people that she has worked on designing materials for both solid-state batteries and next-generation nuclear reactors, they are often surprised, assuming that these energy systems are very different.
“But from the perspective of materials science and mechanical engineering, the problems I’m working on are actually pretty similar across these different applications,” says Kim, who joined the UW-Madison Department of Mechanical Engineering as an assistant professor in January 2026. “In these energy systems, there are open-system reactions such as electrochemical or nuclear processes that induce huge stresses inside materials, which can cause damage and lead to degradation.”
That’s a problem because materials in battery electrodes and nuclear reactors must endure for years. “If we build an energy system but need to replace damaged materials after six months, for instance, that’s not economically sustainable,” she says.
Kim’s research focuses on understanding and engineering materials’ damage tolerance under these open-system reactions. She aims to design more durable materials with desirable properties that can enable scalable, efficient and long-lasting energy systems that are both environmentally and economically sustainable.
In many clean energy systems, it’s often impossible to avoid mechanical damage from occurring in materials. But not all damage is equally detrimental, Kim says, noting that some types of mechanical damage are relatively harmless for the material. Her research involves exploring how to design materials so that any damage stays benign and doesn’t lead to catastrophic failure.
Kim earned her doctorate in materials science and engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2023 and subsequently conducted postdoctoral research in MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering. She started out primarily as an experimentalist, but when the COVID pandemic prevented her from working in the lab, she developed computational skills and recognized the unique benefit of seamless iteration between computation and experiments within a non-siloed research workflow. Today, she leverages this integrated approach to screen materials computationally and then validate them experimentally, or to combine both methods to enable hypothesis testing beyond what either approach alone can achieve.
While she is a materials scientist by training, Kim says she grew to appreciate the importance of mechanical engineering in tackling the problems she was interested in. “Manufacturability of a system composed of multiple materials is often overlooked in early materials design and later emerges as a major bottleneck to market translation, while co-engineering of materials and manufacturing methods can in principle reciprocally enable one another,” she says. “I realized that harnessing the concept of concurrent engineering, which was established in the mechanical engineering discipline, could allow me to more efficiently address the problem.”
In line with her interest in concurrent materials design and manufacturing innovation, UW-Madison’s close interaction with the local manufacturing industry, reflecting the Wisconsin Idea’s emphasis on translational impact, was a big attraction for joining the university. At UW-Madison, she plans to establish an electrochemical-mechanical lab that integrates high-throughput atomistic modeling with autonomous chemical synthesis and structural characterization, facilitating systematic exploration of the materials and manufacturing design space for a sustainable energy economy.
Kim was hired through the RISE-EARTH initiative at UW-Madison, which Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin launched to strategically hire faculty members and improve interdisciplinary collaboration aimed at building sustainable energy and technical systems. “Bringing together experts from different fields to collaborate is very important for solving problems and making a real-world impact,” she says, “so I really appreciate this initiative and am excited to be part of it.”
Photo of So Yeon Kim by Joel Hallberg