Professor Zhenan Bao is a Professor of Chemical Engineering at Stanford University. Prior to joining Stanford in 2004, she was a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff in Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies from 1995-2004. She has over 400 refereed publications and over 60 US patents with a Google Scholar H-Index >110. She pioneered a number of design concepts for organic electronic materials. Her work has enabled flexible electronic circuits and displays. In her recent work, she has developed skin-inspired organic electronic materials, which resulted in unprecedented performance or functions in medical devices, energy storage and environmental applications.

Bao is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. She is a Fellow of MRS, ACS, AAAS, SPIE, ACS PMSE and ACS POLY.  She served on the Board of Directors for MRS in 2003-2005 and as an Executive Committee Member for the Polymer Materials Science and Engineering division of the American Chemical Society. She is an Associate Editor for Chemical Sciences.

Bao was selected as Nature’s Ten people who mattered in 2015 for her work on artificial electronic skin. She was awarded the AICHE Andreas Acrivos Award for Professional Progress in Chemical Engineering in 2014, ACS Carl Marvel Creative Polymer Chemistry Award in 2013, ACS Cope Scholar Award in 2011, she was the recipient of the Royal Society of Chemistry Beilby Medal and Prize in 2009, the IUPAC Creativity in Applied Polymer Science Prize in 2008, American Chemical Society Team Innovation Award 2001, R&D 100 Award and R&D Magazine’s Editors Choice of the “Best of the Best” new technology for 2001. She has been selected in 2002 by the American Chemical Society Women Chemists Committee as one of the twelve “Outstanding Young Woman Scientist who is expected to make a substantial impact in chemistry during this century”. She was also selected by MIT Technology Review magazine in 2003 as one of the top 100 young innovators for this century.

Bao is a co-founder and on the Board of Directors for C3 Nano, a silicon-valley venture funded start-up commercializing flexible transparent electrodes.