Kyra Yap
MS ‘23, PhD ‘25
Chemical Engineering
Academic advisor: Professor Thomas Jaramillo
What have you been up to since your time at Stanford?
Since I graduated from Stanford in April 2025, I took some time off to visit home (Australia) and family. I was also able to take a much-needed vacation with my sister to do a tour of South Korea. After returning to the US, I have been working as a postdoctoral researcher with Prof. Nitash Balsara in the ChemE department at UC-Berkeley. Here, I am studying ion transport in various solid-state electrolytes for application in Li-ion batteries. I am also starting as an assistant professor in the ChemE department at MIT in January 2027.
What’s your fondest memory from your time at Stanford?
I started my PhD in 2020, during Covid, so many of my fondest memories at Stanford revolve around getting to meet people for the first time. I vividly remember meeting my cohort for the first time outside in the park. Everyone was masked up and standing far apart, but I finally got to see everyone in real life. It is always surprising when you see people’s true heights compared to how you perceived their height over Zoom. I similarly enjoyed meeting the Jaramillo lab (and Tom) for the first time in 2021. We met up in the park during the day, under similar conditions, and took photos standing many feet apart. One other really fond memory I have of Stanford is my PhD defense. Being able to have my family and friends (old and new) all in one place after 5 years of hiding away in a lab was one of the most exciting days of my Stanford career.
What advice would you like to share with our current students and postdocs?
Stanford is a place that offers so many resources and opportunities, and I would encourage you to make the most of them. During my time at Stanford, I was able to explore things outside of science which interested me, including doing some tennis coaching at the Stanford Campus Recreation Association, serving on a Stanford board, and starting my own high school program (SSTEP) through the ChemE department. At Stanford, I had the opportunity to discover my passions outside of the lab and was given the resources to pursue these passions and sometimes turn them into full-fledged programs. This is a unique environment where you have the freedom to explore programs that might not lead anywhere (or might lead to big things) and I hope that current students and postdocs leverage the resources they have available to them to make the most of their time at Stanford. In addition to the material resources, I got a lot of value from the Stanford alumni network. During the 3rd year of my PhD, I spent a lot of time figuring out what career path I wanted to pursue and conducted numerous informational interviews with Stanford alumni I had met through my various extracurriculars and the career events I attended. This really helped me decide on the career path that aligned with my passions and which I felt would bring me a lot of joy.
