Professor Hao Yan, currently the Regents Professor and Milton D Glick Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Arizona State University, and Director of the Center for Molecular Design and Biomimetics in the Biodesign Institute, visited NUS Physics from 2 to 4 June as part of the Distinguished Visitor Lecture Series. A pioneer of structural DNA nanotechnology, Prof Yan has helped establish it as a chemical and engineering discipline and has played a central role in shaping the global biomolecular nanoscience community.

The theme of Prof Yan’s research is to use nature’s design rules as inspiration to advance biomedical, energy-related, and other technological innovations through the use of self-assembling molecules and materials. He aims to create intelligent materials with better component controls at the molecular level. He leads an interdisciplinary team to design bio-inspired molecular building blocks and program their higher order assembly into systems that will perform complex functions.