September 4, 2026
The Royal Society of New South Wales is delighted to learn that one of its Fellows, Professor Yansong Shen FRSN FTSE, has been awarded the 2026 Australian Museum Eureka Prize for Sustainability Research.
Professor Yansong Shen, of UNSW Sydney and the winner of the RSNSW 2024 Edgeworth David Medal, has developed a low-cost, scalable, portable process to recover the valuable metals and silicon from used solar panels.
With an estimated 60–78 million tonnes of panels requiring recycling by 2050, this end-to-end technology could recover valuable metals, including silver, and support more sustainable solar-waste management.
He is the Director of the UNSW SCoPE Lab for Green Metals and also the Director of the ARC Research Hub for Solar Panel Recycling,
The Council of the Society warmly congratulates Professor Shen on this achievement and on this further recognition of the impact of his outstanding research.
