Hui Wu

After earning a PhD at the elite Tsinghua University in Beijing, he went to Stanford as a postdoc, joining the lab of Yi Cui, one of the top battery chemists in the world. But later his father fell ill with lung cancer, and “as an only child, I don’t think I had any choice other than to come back to help my family,” he explains. In 2012, he took a job teaching and researching at Tsinghua. (His father came to Beijing to receive treatment but died last year.) Wu uses nanostructured materials to improve the efficiency of batteries. And he feels the urgency of his quest even more back home, given the alarming levels of pollution in China’s large cities