Bu Wang has always been drawn to engineering. Whether it was building model planes as a child or roasting his own coffee beans after he moved from China to the United States for graduate school, he would spend hours tinkering with parts and pieces and figuring out the perfect conditions for a process of interest.

“I initially roasted coffee beans with a popcorn popper that I modified for better temperature control,” says Wang, who joined the University of Wisconsin-Madison in January 2018 as an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering and a Grainger Institute for Engineering fellow. “But it didn’t end up working very well, so I eventually purchased a dedicated coffee roaster.”

Now, Wang is thrilled to have the resources for building something much bigger: a research program that revolves around materials, from glass and concrete to next-generation batteries and ceramics for fuel cells.