Zhenan Bao

She is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering since 2016. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Chemical Society and SPIE and serves on the advisory board for ACS Nano, Advanced Functional Materials, Advanced Energy Materials, Chemical Communications, Chemistry of Materials, Materials Today, Nanoscale, and NPG Asia Materials and the board of directors for the Materials Research Society and the Polymers Materials Science and Engineering division of the American Chemical Society. She was also awarded the ACS Cope Scholar Award in 2011.

She was awarded the Beilby Medal and Prize in 2009.

In 2004, she returned to academia by joining the faculty at Stanford University where she is now focusing on studying organic semiconductor and carbon nanotubes using new fabrication methods. Recent work in the lab includes developing electronic skin and all-carbon solar cells.

Bao moved to the United States from China in 1990. Both of her parents were professors at Nanjing University where she initially learned about polymer chemistry in Prof. Gi Xue's lab. One of her major mentors was Elsa Reichmanis who was the department director at Bell Labs. She is married and has two children.

She was enrolled at Nanjing University in 1987, and transferred directly into her Ph.D. in Chemistry at The University of Chicago in 1990. She was one of the early students of Luping Yu and did initial work on liquid-crystalline polymers.