13 Facts About Wendy Mao

Wendy Li-Wen Mao is an American geologist who is a professor at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

Wendy Mao's research considers the mineral physics of planetary interiors, new materials under extreme environments and novel characterisation techniques.

Wendy Mao grew up in Washington, DC Mao attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she specialized in materials science and engineering.

Whilst at MIT, Wendy Mao was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa society.

Wendy Mao moved to the University of Chicago as a graduate student, where she studied the geochemistry of iron in the core of the Earth.

Wendy Mao was made Professor of Geological Science at Stanford.

Wendy Mao's research considers the study of extreme environments in an effort to design more efficient materials for energy generation and storage.

In 2015, Wendy Mao found evidence that life existed on earth 4.1 billion years ago, which indicates that it survived the well-documented bombardment of the inner solar system that formed the craters in the moon.

Wendy Mao made use of X-ray imaging to study zircons, durable minerals that form from molten rocks and preserve information about their immediate environments for hundreds of thousands of years.

Beyond zircons, Wendy Mao has used the X-ray laser and X-ray free-electron lasers at SLAC to study the formation of ice, and how the process depends on pressure and temperature.

Wendy Mao has combined her training in materials science with her interest in geology to design light, strong metal alloys.

Wendy Mao showed that use of high pressure disrupts these interactions, and that the hexagonal close packed structures persisted even when the pressure was removed.

Wendy Mao used high pressure, high temperature chambers to form stable phases of perovskites.