Jackie Ying

Jackie Y. Ying was born in Taipei and raised in Singapore and New York. She earned a Bachelor of Engineering, summa cum laude, in chemical engineering from The Cooper Union in 1987, and completed her PhD at Princeton University in 1991 as an AT&T Bell Laboratories PhD Scholar.

Ying has built a career at the intersection of bioengineering and nanotechnology, holding distinguished positions at some of the world’s leading research institutions. She served as professor of chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and as executive director of the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology at A*STAR in Singapore. She is currently chief research and innovation officer at King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre in Saudi Arabia.

Ying serves on the Board of Trustees of Princeton University, the Board of Directors of Saudi Arabia’s Research, Development and Innovation Authority, the Advisory Board of the Saudi Authority of Intellectual Property, and the Strategic Committee of the Saudi Ministry of Education’s University Affairs Council.

A prolific researcher, she has authored more than 400 articles, accumulating over 54,600 citations and an h index of 111. Her contributions to nanomaterials and bioengineering have been recognized with numerous honours, including the Mustafa Prize, the King Faisal Prize in Science, the World Economic Forum Young Global Leader designation and MIT’s Technology Review Inaugural TR100 Young Innovator Award. She has been elected to the US National Academy of Engineering, the US National Academy of Inventors and the German National Academy of Sciences, Leopoldina. In 2025, she was named to the inaugural Forbes 50 Over 50 Global List of Women Trailblazers.

Jackie Ying addresses the Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science convocation ceremony on Tuesday, June 16, 2026, at 3 p.m.