Betar Gallant

Betar Gallant will join the MIT faculty in January 2016 as an assistant professor of mechanical engineering. Gallant completed her BS, MS, and PhD in mechanical engineering at MIT. During her graduate studies with Professor Yang Shao-Horn, she was an National Science Foundation graduate research fellow, an MIT Martin Family Fellow and an MIT Energy Initiative Fellow. Gallant was a Kavli Nanoscience Institute Prize postdoctoral fellow at Caltech, where her research focused on tuning mechanical properties via surface chemistry control in Si-polymer structures for solar fuels applications. She will develop materials and devices for energy and environmental cleanup applications including greenhouse gas and pollutant capture and conversion, which will be informed by the understanding of chemical and electrochemical reaction pathways. She plans to utilize nanoscale insights into heat and mass transfer and energy conversion to bridge molecular control of processes with scalable environmental technologies.