Dr. Dongliang (Donny) Chao wins the Innovators Under 35 MIT 35 award

This acclaimed list honours innovators making great strides in their respective fields. The list celebrates researchers, inventors, and entrepreneurs who are changing the world. MIT Technology Review’s ‘Innovators Under 35’ list for the Asia Pacific region honours 10 women and 10 men.

“It’s part of our ethos that technology can, and should, be a force for good,” said Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau, CEO and publisher of MIT Technology Review. “We’re excited to be expanding our pool of talented young men and women, celebrating the impact they are making in this world.”

“The ‘Innovators Under 35’ are a group of exceptional young scientists pursuing research that - in many cases - relates to substantial challenges facing humanity.  The potential impact of their research is further increased when it becomes the foundation of one or more products that form the core of a Deep Tech startup,” said Steve Leonard, Founding CEO, SGInnovate. “Building a company from scratch is always hard, and even more so in the Deep Tech space.” - EmTech Asia is pleased to partner with SGInnovate as the 2020 Deep Tech Partner of the event. 
 
Among the 2020 Innovators Under 35 are researchers, inventors, and entrepreneurs whose work includes applications in agriculture, artificial intelligence, biomedicine, construction, energy, new materials, robotics, and water. 

Congratulations to Dr Donny Chao for being awarded the MIT 35 award. He is one of the two winners in Australia region. His innovative work titled “Finding new battery technologies for next-generation safe, low-cost and scalable energy storage”. Relative new battery technologies were mainly achieved and patented in UoA, which has attracted ca. 1.5m funds supports for UoA. 

Donny obtained his PhD from Nanyang Technological University (NTU). He joined the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA, USA) in 2016 as a joint researcher, followed by a postdoc at NTU. He is currently an DECRA Fellow at The University of Adelaide, focusing on materials for next-generation safe, low-cost, and scalable energy storage. Dr. Chao is serving as the Managing Editor for the journal, Materials Today Energy. He has published more than 80 articles and authored one book. His H-index is 38 with citations of more than 6,300.

The ‘Innovators Under 35’ will be recognised at the EmTech Asia conference, held on 25-26 February 2020 at the Marina Bay Sands Expo and Convention Centre in Singapore. 

About Innovators Under 35

Since 1999, MIT Technology Review has recognised outstanding young innovators under the age of 35. Innovators Under 35 honourees are celebrated annually for their work in shaping the future of technology in fields such as biotechnology, materials, computer hardware, energy, transportation, communications, and the Internet. Our goal is to recognise the development of new technology or the creative application of existing technologies to solve the world’s biggest problems. We reward ingenious and elegant work that matters to the world at large—not just to peers in a particular field or industry. In 2010, we expanded our search for the most promising innovators by organising regional editions of the list. There are regional versions in Latin America, Europe, China, India, the Middle East and Southeast Asia/Oceania. Past global Innovators Under 35 honourees include Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Tumblr’s David Karp and Spotify’s Daniel Ek among others.