Liang Feng

The climate crisis is reshaping how we harvest, store, and consume energy globally. The Feng Group at Duke is dedicated to addressing grand challenges in energy, climate, health, and environmental sustainability by working at the intersection of materials, photo- and electrochemical, and polymer science and engineering. Our goal is to create innovative materials for capturing essential elements like carbon dioxide from air and sea, and to develop sustainable strategies for using these elements. Using renewable energy, we aim to create efficient methods to turn these molecules into valuable products. We will develop clean cooling techniques that aid in a fair transition to a net-zero carbon future, providing access to efficient, climate-friendly heat management. Additionally, we study bio-inspired materials and bio-interfaces, concentrating on their impact on cell health and the effects of greenhouse gases on biological systems.

Dr. Feng earned his Ph.D. in 2020 from Texas A&M University, where he investigated hierarchical architectures of porous materials with applications in carbon capture, gas separation, and catalysis. As a postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University (2020-2023), he worked with Sir Fraser Stoddart (2016 Nobel Laureate) to explore non-equilibrium materials and their energy applications. Liang made a groundbreaking discovery of the first fundamentally new adsorption mechanism since the 1930s, revolutionizing the approach to methane and hydrogen storage, carbon capture, and water remediation in non-equilibrium systems.