Gang Chen (engineer)

Gang Chen (Chinese: 陈刚; pinyin: Chén Gāng) is a Chinese-born American mechanical engineer and nanotechnologist. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he is currently the Carl Richard Soderberg Professor of Power Engineering. He served as head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT from July 2013 to June 2018. He directs the Solid-State Solar-Thermal Energy Conversion Center, an energy frontier research center formerly funded by the United States Department of Energy. He was elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2010 and of the National Academy of Sciences in 2023. In January 2021, Chen was charged by the United States Department of Justice under the now abolished China Initiative, for allegedly failing to disclose connections to several Chinese educational programs when submitting a federal grant application. His arrest prompted protests by other academics including MIT's then president Leo Rafael Reif and editorials in the scientific press over the United States government targeting of Chinese American professors. One year later, federal prosecutors dropped the charges after evidence showed that the disclosures in question were not actually required by the federal government.