Jackie Yi Ru Ying

Biography

Ying was born in Taipei in 1966. She moved to Singapore with her family in 1973 where she was a student at Raffles Girls' School. Her family moved to New York when she was 15. She earned a B.Eng. degree, graduating summa cum laude from Cooper Union in 1987. She then attended Princeton University, receiving her MA in 1988 and her PhD in 1991, both in chemical engineering. She spent a year as a Humboldt Fellow at the Institute for New Materials in Saarbrücken and researched nanocrystalline materials with Herbert Gleiter.

Ying became a professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1992. She was made a full professor in 2001; at 35 she was one of MIT's youngest full professors.

Ying returned to Singapore in 2003 to serve as the first executive director of the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology, a division of the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR). Her research concerns the biomedical and catalytic applications of nanostructured systems and materials.

Ying was elected to the Singapore Women's Hall of Fame in 2014.

In December 2015, it was announced that she was one of the recipients of the inaugural 2015 Mustafa Prize awarded by the Mustafa Science and Technology Foundation. She was awarded the "Top Scientific Achievement" award for "her great scientific and technological contributions and achievements to the synthesis of well-designed advanced nanostructured materials and systems, nanostructured biomaterials and miniaturised biosystems for various interesting applications".