“GM does a good job in diversity and inclusion," Technologist of the Year, Mei Cai, Ph.D., told Women of Color magazine. As the director of battery cell systems research in the General Motors (GM) Chemical & Materials System Laboratory, she works with people in cross-functional teams. But over 25 years at the automotive giant, Dr. Cai has found that respect for others is important.

"At GM, I see a lot of women scientists and engineers," she said. "However, a lot of women might not know about all the opportunities in the automotive industry. If GM had not come back to me after my second internship, I would not have known. We need to do more to educate and inform women about jobs in the auto industry.”

Mei’s contributions in advanced energy storage materials include lithium-ion and advanced battery chemistries, proton-exchange membrane fuel cells, hydrogen, compressed natural gas storage, and battery charging and hydrogen production technologies.

She has played a pivotal role in developing GM’s upcoming Ultium battery chemistry, which will power vehicles like the GMC Hummer EV and the Cadillac Lyriq.

GM’s Ultium batteries are unique because the pouch-style cells can be stacked vertically or horizontally inside the battery pack. This allows engineers to optimize battery energy storage and layout for each vehicle design.

The design enabled a structurally integrated RESS capable of sustaining vehicle use and abuse conditions. The compact cooling system improves the energy efficiency of the battery pack but also simplifies the manufacturing process. Other technologies that Mei and her team have patented include:

The three-electrode setup allows for independent diagnostics of the positive or negative electrode and, hence, precise detection of lithium plating and calibration for on-vehicle charging control. This innovative design paves the road toward accelerated advanced high-energy and high-power EV batteries with reduced cost.

She grew up in Beijing, the capital of the People’s Republic of China. Her father was a professor at Tsinghua University, described as “one of the most prestigious and influential universities” in the world.

Mei’s mother was a medical doctor and the couple had two daughters, including Mei (pronounced like May, the Gregorian calendar month). Mei says she considers herself lucky to have been born into a modern family.

“They had an open mind,” she said on a Zoom call with Women of Color magazine this summer. “There was no boy in our family. Back then, many families preferred sons because they could carry on the family’s last name.”

But Mei’s parents raised their daughters to believe that they could do anything boys can do, and even better. Cai’s grandparents also played a significant role in her upbringing. When she was very young, her busy parents took the toddler to live in Changchun, a northeastern city sometimes called the Detroit of China.

Mei's grandfather had earned a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Chicago. After his Ph.D., he returned home to Jilin University and built a college of chemistry from scratch.

“To this day, I remember there were books everywhere,” Mei recalls of her grandparents’ home. “Books lined the walls, and doors were always open to students. So, I observed how to ask questions.”

Initially, Mei was drawn to her mother’s profession, fascinated by organs in the human body and how her mother worked on healing patients. But young Mei was also good at math and physics, which was not lost on her mom. Looking back, Mei admits that parents know their kids best.

Mei went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering at Tsinghua University in Beijing, which boasts more than 90 universities in a city serving over 20 million people.

While at Tsinghua, Mei met her future husband, then a Ph.D. student, on the same campus. After graduation, she got a job as a product engineer with a local industrial design institute.

“My husband stayed in school, and I went to work. I was satisfied with the pay and working conditions but did not have any passion for going further for an advanced degree,” Mei said. “After a couple of years, we decided to pursue advanced degrees in the U.S.,” she said.

However, like thousands of other Chinese graduates, navigating a multi-continental move and finding resources to leave the country proved to be extremely challenging.

Luckily, Mei’s grandfather came to their aid and was able to provide financial support. However, her husband was not able to complete his Ph.D. before leaving China. While they planned to emigrate to the United States, the couple worked hard to pay for airline tickets, with a bit of help from their families.

“I came to this country close to 30 years ago as a spouse,” she said. “I had to learn English here and prepare for graduate school testing.”

“We had a currency shock,” Mei said. “We came in the 1991 timeframe.” There was a huge currency difference between the U.S. (dollar) and the Chinese (renminbi). In addition, the couple was living on a $900 scholarship awarded to Mei’s husband. That income had to cover their rent, groceries, and everything else.

“There was a book, a special-order book by a professor (my husband’s), that cost $100, and we didn’t have the extra money to buy that book. On top of that, no one offered us any credit cards,” Mei said. “He was forced to copy the book from classmates because he was the only one who couldn’t get the book.”

After her husband transferred to the University of Michigan, Mei started taking courses for a master’s degree in bioengineering at Wayne State University. However, she had not entirely given up her childhood dream of making artificial organs.

“Every single extra penny we had was put into tuition for my first semester,” Mei said. However, she still struggled with speaking English. Thankfully, the language of mathematics is universal.

“Once the professor puts the equation down on the table, you understand right away,” she said. Next, Mei’s professor recommended her for a teaching assistant position in a campus laboratory. Later the same year, he told her GM was hiring summer interns for research that required a bioengineering background and a driver’s license.

Mei's first car was an ‘82 Buick Regal that had clocked about 100,000 miles by the time she bought it. Then, as a newly licensed driver, she remembers hitting the freeway. Even scarier was desperately trying to defog the windshield with their hands because she did not know how to operate the A/C or the recirculation button. Although she and her husband had made two four-day road trips from Ohio to Idaho and Michigan to Idaho during his two nuclear science internships in the United States, the GM internship had a different set of guidelines.

“The requirement was that you had to travel to Florida and Texas, all by yourself,” she said. “You had to drive to dealerships to work with customers and collect data to evaluate the cabin air quality in GM’s Cadillac brand.”

She would lug coolers from GM research labs, collect samples from Cadillacs, and grow microbiomes in hotel rooms to compare with the baseline data. Mei also found time to tour Disney parks and sightsee at Six Flags Over Texas.

During her two internships, she also worked with GM engineers in engines and fuels, eventually landing a permanent position at the automaker. After that, however, she had to go back to her chemical engineering roots, and GM funded her Ph.D. doing chemical engineering.

Mei's rules for the road are: Look for new opportunities, set the right expectations, and always get yourself prepared (because) opportunities come and go in life. Shoot for the Moon. If you miss it, you will still land among the stars.