NES Person of the Year
2020
Header image
By: The Editorial Team at NES
Dr. Robert S. Langer
Co-founder, Massachusetts Institute of Technology / Materials Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Significance of Being Named NES Person of the Year
Being named NES Person of the Year is not a popularity contest. It is a recognition of consequence.
In a world where energy security, industrial competitiveness and the materials that power modern life have become inseparable, NES exists to identify the people who are actually shaping outcomes, not merely commenting on them. The Person of the Year is the individual whose decisions, leadership and results over the preceding twelve months have most clearly advanced the reliable supply of energy and strategic minerals, strengthened the businesses that produce them, or altered the geopolitical and capital-market landscape in which those industries operate.
Selection signals that this person has moved the needle: unlocking production, securing supply chains, allocating capital with discipline, navigating complex jurisdictions, or forcing a clearer public and policy understanding of what is at stake. It is awarded to those who operate at the intersection of geology, engineering, finance and statecraft, the domain NES was created to cover with seriousness and depth.
For the recipient, the acknowledgement carries weight precisely because it is earned inside an industry that measures itself by tonnes, megawatts, contracts and long-term returns rather than by volume of coverage. It places the individual in a permanent record of the people who mattered when the energy transition, the AI power demand surge, and the contest for critical minerals moved from aspiration to hard constraint.
In short, NES Person of the Year marks the leader whose work in the past year most clearly helped determine whether the world will have the energy and the materials it needs. That is the standard. That is the honour.
Why This Person, Why This Year
In a year when the world learned, abruptly and painfully, the cost of fragile supply chains and underbuilt energy infrastructure, the most consequential advances in energy storage came not from a new factory or a new policy but from a laboratory. Dr. Robert S. Langer—David H. Koch Institute Professor at MIT, co-founder of multiple materials-science ventures, and the most cited engineer in history—extended the controlled-release and nanoscale-encapsulation science he pioneered in biomedicine into the two hardest materials problems in energy storage: the stability of battery electrolytes and the durability of grid-level thermal storage media. For NES, this year's defining achievement is the translation of foundational nanoscale delivery science into the materials platform that the energy transition's storage ambitions now depend on.
By the closing weeks of 2020, the global energy-storage sector had reached an inflection point that few outside the materials-science community fully appreciated. Utility-scale battery deployments were accelerating, but the chemistry beneath them was straining against limits that incremental engineering could no longer fully paper over. Thermal runaway incidents in large lithium-ion arrays had prompted a wave of revised safety standards across three continents. Grid operators seeking longer-duration storage were finding that the leap from two-hour battery banks to the eight-, ten-, and twelve-hour systems required for genuine renewable integration depended less on policy ambition than on materials that did not yet exist at commercial scale.
In a laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a solution space was opening that few had expected to come from this source. The Langer Lab at MIT—known to the world for biomedical drug-delivery, tissue engineering, and biomaterials—had spent the better part of the decade quietly extending its core science into energy materials. The same principles of controlled release, nanoscale encapsulation, and polymer architecture that had revolutionised how drugs reach their targets in the human body were being adapted to a different problem: how to stabilise the molecules that store energy, how to deliver them safely under extreme conditions, and how to do so at the scale and cost the grid demands.
The phrase that circulated among the energy-materials researchers who had tracked this work was that the delivery system was the technology. What had long been true in medicine—that the active compound matters less than the vehicle that carries it—was proving equally true in energy storage. The electrolyte that carries ions between a battery's electrodes, the phase-change medium that stores heat in a thermal battery, the encapsulant that protects a reactive cathode material from degradation: each is a delivery problem dressed in electrochemical clothing. In 2020, the laboratory that had done more than any other to define modern delivery science turned the full weight of its methods onto these problems, and the results began to reach the companies that build the grid.
The shift was neither gradual nor incidental. It was a deliberate, methodical mobilisation of one of the most productive research enterprises in the history of materials science, aimed at the binding constraint of the energy transition. The significance lay not in a single device or a single paper but in the convergence of a body of fundamental science with a sector whose needs had finally grown urgent enough to absorb it.
In a laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a solution space was opening that few had expected to come from this source. The Langer Lab at MIT—known to the world for biomedical drug-delivery, tissue engineering, and biomaterials—had spent the better part of the decade quietly extending its core science into energy materials. The same principles of controlled release, nanoscale encapsulation, and polymer architecture that had revolutionised how drugs reach their targets in the human body were being adapted to a different problem: how to stabilise the molecules that store energy, how to deliver them safely under extreme conditions, and how to do so at the scale and cost the grid demands.
The phrase that circulated among the energy-materials researchers who had tracked this work was that the delivery system was the technology. What had long been true in medicine—that the active compound matters less than the vehicle that carries it—was proving equally true in energy storage. The electrolyte that carries ions between a battery's electrodes, the phase-change medium that stores heat in a thermal battery, the encapsulant that protects a reactive cathode material from degradation: each is a delivery problem dressed in electrochemical clothing. In 2020, the laboratory that had done more than any other to define modern delivery science turned the full weight of its methods onto these problems, and the results began to reach the companies that build the grid.
The shift was neither gradual nor incidental. It was a deliberate, methodical mobilisation of one of the most productive research enterprises in the history of materials science, aimed at the binding constraint of the energy transition. The significance lay not in a single device or a single paper but in the convergence of a body of fundamental science with a sector whose needs had finally grown urgent enough to absorb it.
Dr. Robert S. Langer is NES Person of the Year for 2020 because his laboratory's pioneering work on advanced nanoscale material delivery systems produced foundational breakthroughs in two of the energy transition's hardest enabling technologies: grid-level thermal energy storage and battery electrolyte stability. By adapting the controlled-release and encapsulation science he developed over four decades in biomedicine to the materials challenges of energy storage, Langer and his collaborators created pathways to denser, safer, and longer-lived storage systems that the sector had struggled to reach through conventional chemistry alone.
In the domains NES covers—energy security, strategic minerals, and the materials science that underpins the transition—this matters because storage remains the binding constraint on renewable penetration and grid reliability. The materials breakthroughs that make storage cheaper, safer, and more durable do not arrive from policy alone; they arrive from laboratories where fundamental chemistry is translated into deployable form. In 2020, no single materials scientist did more to expand that frontier than Robert Langer.
The achievement is not a single device or a single plant. It is a body of intellectual property, a generation of trained researchers, and a portfolio of technologies now moving through the companies that will commercialise them. That is precisely the kind of foundational, enabling contribution that the energy transition most needs and most often lacks—and it is why NES recognises it as the defining achievement of the year.
In the domains NES covers—energy security, strategic minerals, and the materials science that underpins the transition—this matters because storage remains the binding constraint on renewable penetration and grid reliability. The materials breakthroughs that make storage cheaper, safer, and more durable do not arrive from policy alone; they arrive from laboratories where fundamental chemistry is translated into deployable form. In 2020, no single materials scientist did more to expand that frontier than Robert Langer.
The achievement is not a single device or a single plant. It is a body of intellectual property, a generation of trained researchers, and a portfolio of technologies now moving through the companies that will commercialise them. That is precisely the kind of foundational, enabling contribution that the energy transition most needs and most often lacks—and it is why NES recognises it as the defining achievement of the year.
Key Facts
Age
72
Current Title
David H. Koch Institute Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Company HQ
Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
Signature Focus
Pioneering advanced nanoscale material delivery systems for grid-level thermal energy storage and battery electrolyte stability