Dr Kai Yang DPhil, MRSC
Associate Professor of Textiles Design and Innovation
Dr Kai Yang is an Associate Professor in Textile Design and Innovation at the Winchester School of Art (WSA), University of Southampton.
She received her BSc in Material Engineering from Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology, China, in 2004; and PhD in Chemistry from the University of Leeds in 2009. She joined the Electronics and Computer Sciences, University of Southampton, as a Research Fellow in 2009, promoted to a Senior Research Fellow in 2015 and Principal Research Fellowship in 2018. She joined WSA in 2020 as an Associate Professor. Her research interests are in electronic textile materials, manufacturing, and application development (e.g. healthcare, wearable technologies). She has published over 60 papers.
She has been awarded an EPSRC Innovation Fellowship in 2018 to develop “Advanced E-textiles for Wearable Therapeutics” with the initial application focusing on the osteoarthritis knee joint pain management. She was PI on the £1.1 million SMARTmove project funded by Medical Research Council (MRC) to develop a textile based wearable Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES) training system for stroke upper limb rehabilitation.
She was Co-I of the EPSRC E-textiles Network. The Network is to bring together researchers and developers from academia and industry interested in adding electronic functionality to textiles and their related products. She is Co-Chair for E-textile International Conference 2019, 2020 and 2021.
She was the runner-up for the Royal Academy of Engineering ERA Foundation Entrepreneurs Award 2016. She a co-founder of University spin-out company Smart Fabric Inks and founder of start-up Etexsense.