Yang Luo is a 2022 Prism Award Winner

Yang Luo has been selected as one of five recipients of the 2022 Prism Award from the Society of Women Engineers. Yang graduated from NC State with a Ph.D. in chemical engineering in 1994 and is now the senior R&D director for process technology at Honeywell Advanced Materials. The Prism Award honors women who has charted their own path throughout their career and have provided leadership in the fields of engineering or engineering technology and professional organizations along the way.

Yang is a technology leader with 25 years of broad industrial experiences in R&D innovation strategy, technology roadmap, portfolio management and process development. She led the development and commercialization of numerous novel high-impact process technologies. Yang currently leads Honeywell Advanced Materials R&D process technology team and is responsible for the development and scaling-up of new chemical processes for fluorine products, polymers, additives, films, fibers, refrigerant and battery chemicals.

Over the years, Yang received numerous awards and honors, including the Linde Global Innovation Award, Praxair Innovation Award, induction into the Delphi Innovation Hall of Fame, Delphi Boss Kettering Award, Society of Automotive Engineering’s Environmental Excellence in Transportation Award, and the Delphi Environmental and Energy Project of the Year Award.

Yang believes in promoting the development of women professionals and students in engineering and technology. She has provided mentoring and coaching for many women engineers as well as in professional societies. She served on the Industry Advisory Board for the CBE Department and as a judge for the Schoenborn Graduate Research Symposium, she challenged the department to have more female Ph.D. students presenting and competing in the symposium. She proposed and established the Praxair/Linde Exceptional Teaching Assistant Award for CBE to highlight female graduate students and their achievements.

An elected AIChE fellow, Yang played an instrumental role in the success of the Department of Energy’s Rapid Advancement in Process Intensification Deployment Manufacturing Institute, operated by AIChE. She served the RAPID Institute in many leadership capacities, including the RAPID Governing Board Chair. She co-chaired AIChE education initiatives in Aligning Industrial-Academia Expectation for Chemical Engineering Education.

Yang’s advice to graduate students and young professionals is to “know what you want and keep working toward that.” She also said that taking risks associated with opportunity has helped her advance throughout her career.

Congratulations Yang!