Yildiz was born to two teachers in İzmir, who made her appreciate education and hard work. She became interested in science and engineering whilst at primary school and chose to attend the science specialist school in her home town. During school Yildiz worked with a local university on a project to clean the waters in İzmir bay. Yildiz was an exchange student with a farming school in Wisconsin and had the opportunity to visit Fermilab. She spent her summer holidays on the Aegean Sea. Eventually Yildiz studied nuclear engineering at the Hacettepe University, where she particularly became interested in the technology of nuclear engineering. At the time there were not clear career paths for her to pursue this in Turkey, and Yildiz decided to move to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Yildiz earned her PhD at MIT in 2003 and remained there as a postdoctoral research associate.
Research and career
Whilst working as a research scientist at Argonne National Laboratory Yildiz became interested in electrochemistry and surface science. She returned to MIT as the Norman C. Rasmussen Assistant Professor in 2007. Yildiz leads the Laboratory for Electrochemical Interfaces at MIT. Her research considers how surfaces respond to harsh conditions, including high temperatures, reactive gases, mechanical stress and applied fields. She studies what happens to the electrodes in fuel cells and electrolyzers. By studying the reaction and transport kinetics in fuel cells or cells designed for water splitting, Bilgie hopes to suppress the corrosion of these materials. She has developed in situscanning tunneling microscopy methods to study the atoms at the surface of the electrodes, which often behave differently to those in the bulk. Scanning tunneling microscopes can map atomic tomography as well as electronic structure, providing information about the surface morphology and chemical reactivity. The Yildiz modified STM can also create precise dislocations in a material using the STM tip. Alongside electrochemistry, the Yildiz group develop artificial intelligence and probabilistic methods to try and predict failures in nuclear reactors. In nuclear reactions, metal structures that are critical to safety can degrade due to hydrogen penetration. Hydrogen infiltration can make metals mechanically weak. Yildiz has studied the interaction of hydrogen with the oxides that form on the surfaces of metals. She identified that lattice vacancies can act to trap hydrogen. By identifying the mechanism by which hydrogen enters oxide films, she has designed new alloy compositions that can prevent it. Another challenge for the materials that are used inside power plants is that they can suffer from stress corrosion. Most of these materials are polycrystalline, and the grain boundaries between adjacent tiny crystals can impact a material's response to stress. Yildiz has investigated how grain boundaries and dislocations influence the mechanical and chemical properties of materials. She has demonstrated that dislocations in an atomic lattice can speed up the transport of oxygen ions, increasing the rate of diffusion in fuel cells and oxygen separation membranes. Her recent work has considered the mechanisms responsible for oxygen reduction kinetics in perovskite oxides, as well as investigating interface chemistries in high power density solid batteries. Yildiz identified that strontium cobaltite can switch between a metallic and semiconducting state using a small voltage, which means that it could be used in non-volatile memory. Yildiz has identified the effects of elastic strain, oxygen pressure and dislocations on the degradation and reactivity of hybrid materials. Her group are contributing to the Mars 2020 Mars OXygen In situ resource utilization Experiment instrument, which will attempt to make oxygen out of Martian resources. In 2014 Yildiz was awarded tenure at MIT.
