Iryna Zenyuk

Iryna Zenyuk is a Ukrainian-American scientist working on the development and deployment of renewable hydrogen energy technologies, and an international chess player. She is a professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California Irvine (UCI) and the director of the National Fuel Cell Research Center at UCI.

Education and career
Zenyuk was born in Ukraine and emigrated to the US at age 15. She received a B.S in Mechanical Engineering from Polytechnic University (now NYU Tandon School of Engineering), a M.S. and a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University where she worked on the fundamental understanding meso-scale interfacial transport phenomena and electric double layers in fuel cells. She then became a postdoctoral fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory from 2014 to 2015 studying water-management in Polymer Electrolyte Fuel Cell using x-ray at the Advanced Light Source. From 2015 to 2018, she was an assistant professor at Tufts University, before joining University of California, Irvine in 2018 as an assistant professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Department. She is also the director of the National Fuel Cell Research Center at UCI.

Zenyuk is an accomplished Chess player, reaching an Elo score above 2450, and was ranked among the top 10 women players in the U.S. in 2012.

At the start of the war in Ukraine in 2022, she organized a fundraising to help Ukrainian scientists called the UCI's Ukraine Emergency Response Fund, and collected over $200,000.

Awards and honors

 * 2021 UCI Beal Applied Innovations Early Career Innovator of the Year honors
 * 2021 ECS Energy Technology Division Srinivasan Young Investigator Award
 * 2018 Electrochemical Society (ECS) Toyota Young Investigator Award
 * 2019 UCI Samueli School of Engineering Early Career Faculty Excellence in Research Award
 * 2017 Interpore Society Fraunhofer Award for Young Researchers
 * 2017 NSF CAREER Award