Maria Yang is associate dean of engineering and the Gail E. Kendall Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. Her research and teaching interests are in product design and development, with a focus on early-stage processes to help designers and engineers create products and systems that better serve society.

She is the academic faculty director for MIT D-Lab, which focuses on addressing global poverty through participatory design approaches with local communities. She is associate director of the Morningside Foundation Academy for Design at MIT.

She is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and has received the National Science Foundation CAREER Faculty Award and the American Society for Engineering Education Merryfield Design Award for excellence in teaching engineering design. She earned her S.B. from MIT, and her M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford University, all in mechanical engineering. Yang previously served as director of design at Reactivity, a Silicon Valley startup that is now a part of Cisco Systems.