Maria C. Yang is an American mechanical engineer whose research concerns engineering design.[1] She is Gail E. Kendall (1978) Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Associate Dean of Engineering at MIT,[2] faculty academic director of the MIT D-Lab, and associate director of the MIT Morningside Academy for Design.[3]
Yang is originally from West Lafayette, Indiana, where her father, Chinese-American aerospace engineer Henry T. Yang, worked as a professor at Purdue University. She majored in mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,[1] graduating in 1991.[2] Next, she went to Stanford University for graduate study in mechanical engineering, supported by a NSF Graduate Fellowship.[4] She earned a master's degree in 1994 and completing her Ph.D. in 2000.[2] Her dissertation, Retrieval of informal information from design: A thesaurus based approach, was supervised by Mark Cutkosky.[5]
After postdoctoral research at the California Institute of Technology, industrial work as director of design at Reactivity, Inc.,[6] and a faculty position as assistant professor of industrial and systems engineering at the University of Southern California,[6][4] Yang moved to MIT in 2007,[2] as Robert N. Noyce Career Development Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Engineering Systems.[6]
Yang won a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2006.[4] She was elected as an ASME Fellow by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 2013.[7] She won the Fred Merryfield Design Award of the American Society for Engineering Education in 2014.[8]
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