McGill Alumnus Xiangkun (Elvis) Cao Named to Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in Energy

Xiangkun (Elvis) Cao, M.Eng. 16’ in Materials Engineering from McGill, currently a Ph.D. student in the Erickson Lab at Cornell, is named to Forbes’ 30 Under 30 List in Energy – Class of 2019, for his work on “HI-Light,” a solar-thermal chemical reactor technology for converting CO2 to fuels like syngas or methanol. Read more on the Forbes website.

“At Cornell, Xiangkun Cao leads the HI-Light project, a solar-thermal chemical reactor technology for converting CO2 to fuels like syngas or methanol. The technology seeks to achieve a kind of artificial photosynthesis - combining sunlight, CO2 and chemicals to photocatalytically produce renewable fuels. In time this technique could make CO2 capture and conversion economical.”

Before joining Cornell, Elvis received his Master’s degree from McGill University (2014-2016) with joint training by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2015-2016). Elvis received his M.Eng. (thesis) degree in Materials Engineering from McGill in 2016, under the supervision of Professor Roderick Guthrie (Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and the Canadian Academy of Engineering)& Dr. Mihaiela Isac, on developing anaqueous particle sensor to detect micro-bubbles/inclusions for clean steel production. While at MIT, Elvis worked on developing safer accident tolerant fuel cladding materials to help avoid the Fukushima nuclear disaster, in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering with Professor Michael Short & Professor Matteo Bucci.

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