Student Fellows
Adela Chenyang Li
- PhD candidate
- 2025 -2026 Rasikbhai L. Meswani Fellow for Water Solutions
- Department of Mechanical Engineering
Adela received a B.S. degree in mechanical engineering from UC Berkeley in 2020, where she first pursued water development work for communities in need as part of Engineers Without Borders. She has been a PhD candidate in the Device Research Lab (part of the Rohsenow Kendall Heat Transfer Lab) at MIT, working with co-advisors Prof. Evelyn Wang and Prof. Gang Chen. She is also passionate about mentoring and is currently the lead graduate teaching assistant for Course 2.006 (Thermofluids Engineering II) at MIT.
Adela’s research is focused on advancing a sorption-based atmospheric water harvesting (SAWH) technology that captures water from the air for water-scarce communities, even in extremely arid climates. She is interested in combining both fundamental studies to better understand microscopic processes governing the limits of the technology, as well as practical device fabrication to demonstrate scalable SAWH in the real world.