Jun Yao
Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Massachusetts Amherst
- Amherst MA
Jun Yao has made international news for his discovery of how to create power from the humidity in air.
University of Massachusetts Amherst
View more experts managed by University of Massachusetts Amherst
Expertise
Biography
In 2023, he made international news when a research team he led figured out how to create power from thin air using a tiny device that generates electricity from humidity in the air.
Social Media
Video
Education
Fudan University
B.S.
Electrical Engineering
Fudan University
M.S.
Physics
Rice University
Ph.D.
Applied Physics
Select Recent Media Coverage
Generating Electricity from Air, with Jun Yao
Climate Break Podcast online
2024-06-11
Jun Yao discusses his work developing technology that generates electricity from the humidity in air.
UMass Amherst engineers create bioelectronic mesh capable of growing with cardiac tissues for comprehensive heart monitoring
Bioengineer online
2024-03-21
Jun Yao discusses his new study in which a UMass-led research team successfully built a tissue-like bioelectronic mesh system integrated with an array of graphene sensors for heart monitoring. “Our sensor can give real-time feedback to scientists and drug researchers, and it can do so in a cost-effective way,” Yao says.
How harvesting electricity from humid air could one day power our devices
BBC online
2023-07-11
No-one in the lab could quite believe what they were seeing. An experimental device, a humidity sensor, had started generating electrical signals. Fine, you might think – except that shouldn't have been possible.
"For some reason, the student who was working on the device forgot to plug in the power," says Jun Yao at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. "That's the start of the story."
Since that moment five years ago, Yao and his colleagues have been developing a technology that can harvest electricity from nothing but humid air: a concept known as hygroelectricity.
‘It was an accident’: the scientists who have turned humid air into renewable power
The Guardian online
2023-07-02
“To be frank, it was an accident,” says the study’s lead author, Prof Jun Yao. “We were actually interested in making a simple sensor for humidity in the air. But for whatever reason, the student who was working on that forgot to plug in the power.”
This New Device Generates Electricity From Thin Air
Smithsonian Magazine
2023-05-31
“What we have invented, you can imagine it’s like a small-scale, man-made cloud,” Jun Yao, a co-author of the new paper and an electrical engineer at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “The entire Earth is covered with a thick layer of humidity,” Yao tells the Washington Post. “It’s an enormous source of clean energy. This is just the beginning in making use of that," Yao says.
Scientists generate 'electricity from thin air.' Humidity could be a boundless source of energy, they say.
USA Today online
2023-05-31
“The air contains an enormous amount of electricity,” said Jun Yao, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the paper’s senior author. “Think of a cloud, which is nothing more than a mass of water droplets. Each of those droplets contains a charge, and when conditions are right, the cloud can produce a lightning bolt – but we don’t know how to reliably capture electricity from lightning.
Scientists find way to make energy from air using nearly any material
The Washington Post online
2023-05-26
“What we have invented, you can imagine it’s like a small-scale, man-made cloud,” said Jun Yao, a professor of engineering at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the senior author of the study. “This is really a very easily accessible, enormous source of continuous clean electricity. Imagine having clean electricity available wherever you go.”
Scientists Harvest Electricity From "Thin Air" Using Strange Material
Futurism online
2023-05-26
"The air contains an enormous amount of electricity," Jun Yao said. "Think of a cloud, which is nothing more than a mass of water droplets. Each of those droplets contains a charge, and when conditions are right, the cloud can produce a lightning bolt—but we don’t know how to reliably capture electricity from lightning. What we’ve done is to create a human-built, small-scale cloud that produces electricity for us predictably and continuously so that we can harvest it."
Generating electricity ‘out of thin air’
Cosmos Magazine online
2020-02-17
Writing in the journal Nature, electrical engineer Jun Yao and microbiologist Derek Lovley, from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, introduce the Air-gen (or air-powered generator), which Lovley describes as “the most amazing and exciting application of protein nanowires yet”.
Select Publications
An Effective Sneak‐Path Solution Based on a Transient‐Relaxation Device
Advanced Materials2023
An efficient strategy for addressing individual devices is required to unveil the full potential of memristors for high‐density memory and computing applications. Existing strategies using two‐terminal selectors that are preferable for compact integration have trade‐offs in reduced generality or functional window. A strategy that applies to broad memristors and maintains their full‐range functional window is proposed. This strategy uses a type of unipolar switch featuring a transient relaxation or retention as the selector. The unidirectional current flow in the switch suppresses the sneak‐path current, whereas the transient‐relaxation window is exploited for bidirectional programming.
Recent Progress in Bio-voltage Memristors Working with Ultralow Voltage of Biological Amplitude
Nanoscale2023
Neuromorphic systems built from memristors that emulate bioelectrical information processing in the brain may overcome the limitations of traditional computing architectures. However, functional emulation alone may still not attain all the merits of bio-computation, which uses action potentials of 50–120 mV at least 10 times lower than signal amplitude in conventional electronics to achieve extraordinary power efficiency and effective functional integration. Reducing the functional voltage in memristors to this biological amplitude can thus advance neuromorphic engineering and bio-emulated integration. This review aims to provide a timely update on the effort and progress in this burgeoning research direction, covering the aspects of device material composition, performance, working mechanism, and potential application.
Microbial nanowires with genetically modified peptide ligands to sustainably fabricate electronic sensing devices
Biosensors and Bioelectronics2023
Nanowires have substantial potential as the sensor component in electronic sensing devices. However, surface functionalization of traditional nanowire and nanotube materials with short peptides that increase sensor selectivity and sensitivity requires complex chemistries with toxic reagents. In contrast, microorganisms can assemble pilin monomers into protein nanowires with intrinsic conductivity from renewable feedstocks, yielding an electronic material that is robust and stable in applications, but also biodegradable.
Generic Air‐gen Effect in Nanoporous Materials for Sustainable Energy Harvesting from Air Humidity
Advanced Materials2023
Air humidity is a vast, sustainable reservoir of energy that, unlike solar and wind, is continuously available. However, previously described technologies for harvesting energy from air humidity are either not continuous or require unique material synthesis or processing, which has stymied scalability and broad deployment. Here, we report a generic effect for continuous energy harvesting from air humidity, which can be applied to a broad range of inorganic, organic, and biological materials. The common feature of these materials is that they are engineered with appropriate nanopores to allow air water to pass through and undergo dynamic adsorption‐desorption exchange at the porous interface, resulting in surface charging.
Two-Terminal MoS2 Memristor and the Homogeneous Integration with a MoS2 Transistor for Neural Networks
Nano Letters2023
Memristors are promising candidates for constructing neural networks. However, their dissimilar working mechanism to that of the addressing transistors can result in a scaling mismatch, which may hinder efficient integration. Here, we demonstrate two-terminal MoS2 memristors that work with a charge-based mechanism similar to that in transistors, which enables the homogeneous integration with MoS2 transistors to realize one-transistor–one-memristor addressable cells for assembling programmable networks
