Chao Wang

About

Chao Wang is a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Johns Hopkins University and the director of the Nano Energy Laboratory. He also serves as the director of the department's master’s admissions. His research interests are primarily in carbon dioxide capture and conversion, electrochemical energy conversion and storage, and heterogeneous catalysis for green chemical engineering. Wang emphasizes the importance of building sustainability through efficient and environmentally friendly energy conversion, storage schemes, and chemical transformations. His group focuses on the synthesis, characterization, and functionalization of new nanomaterials with tailored atomic structures to enhance catalytic activity, selectivity, and stability, as well as designing and engineering electro- and thermo-chemical processes at high energy efficiencies with reduced carbon footprints. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Science and Technology of China in 2004 and his doctorate from Brown University in 2009. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Argonne National Laboratory, he joined Johns Hopkins University in 2012 as an assistant professor.

Research topics

• Chemistry
• Nanotechnology
• Materials science
• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Organic chemistry
• Combinatorial chemistry
• Chemical engineering
• Data science
• Metallurgy

Selected publications

• Advanced Electrocatalysts with Single-Metal-Atom Active Sites

  Chemical Reviews · 2020 · 961 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Electrocatalysts with single metal atoms as active sites have received increasing attention owing to their high atomic utilization efficiency and exotic catalytic activity and selectivity. This review aims to provide a comprehensive summary on the recent development of such single-atom electrocatalysts (SAECs) for various energy-conversion reactions. The discussion starts with an introduction of the different types of SAECs, followed by an overview of the synthetic methodologies to control the a…

  DOI

• High-entropy nanoparticles: Synthesis-structure-property relationships and data-driven discovery

  Science · 2022 · 940 citations

  High-entropy nanoparticles have become a rapidly growing area of research in recent years. Because of their multielemental compositions and unique high-entropy mixing states (i.e., solid-solution) that can lead to tunable activity and enhanced stability, these nanoparticles have received notable attention for catalyst design and exploration. However, this strong potential is also accompanied by grand challenges originating from their vast compositional space and complex atomic structure, which h…

  DOI

• Denary oxide nanoparticles as highly stable catalysts for methane combustion

  Nature Catalysis · 2021 · 307 citations

  DOI

• Methane pyrolysis-enabled production of high-value carbon fibres

  Nature Sustainability · 2026-04-16

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Data associated with the publication: Cold quad-modal nanocomplex for precise and quantitative in vivo stem cell tracking

  Research Data Repository, Duke University · 2026-04-01

  datasetOpen access

  The datasets within correspond to the Science Advances article titled “Cold Quad-Modal Nanocomplex for Precise and Quantitative In Vivo Stem Cell Tracking”. The data are organized in terms of the corresponding Figure number within the paper: <a href = "https://advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/adfm.202523758">https://advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/adfm.202523758</a>

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Enhancing CO2 Reduction by Controlling the Ensemble of Active Sites

  NSF · $457k · 2019–2023

• INFEWS N/P/H2O: Collaborative Research: Catalytic Dephosphorylation Using Ceria Nanocrystals

  NSF · $300k · 2017–2020

• DMREF/Collaborative Research: Design of Multifunctional Catalytic Interfaces from First Principles

  NSF · $288k · 2014–2019

Frequent coauthors

• Shouheng Sun

  Brown University

  111 shared

• Xinhe Bao

  Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics

  58 shared

• Nenad M. Marković

  Argonne National Laboratory

  55 shared

• Vojislav R. Stamenković

  53 shared

• Rongtan Li

  Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics

  52 shared

• Qiang Fu

  Chinese Academy of Sciences

  47 shared

• Dongguo Li

  34 shared

• Hideo Daimon

  31 shared

Education

• PhD, Engineering Division

  Brown University

  2009

• BSc, Physics

  University of Science and Technology of China

  2004

Awards & honors

• ARPA-E Project to Advance High-Density Energy Storage

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