Professor Younan Xia, Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, EMORY University, US

Putting Chemistry to Work for Nano, Energy, and Medicine

Nanomaterials have found widespread use in many applications, including photonics, electronics, catalysis, energy conversion, sensing, imaging, and medicine. For more than 25 years, we have been working diligently to develop chemical methods for synthesizing novel nanomaterials with well-controlled properties.
In this talk, I will briefly discuss some of the recent developments, with a focus on the rational design and controlled synthesis of various types of nanomaterials for catalysis, fuel cell technology, drug delivery, and cancer theranostics.
At the end, I will discuss how to scale up the synthesis of these nanomaterials without losing control to produce samples with the quality, quantity, and reproducibility needed for a systematic study of their fundamental properties as a function of size, shape, and internal structure, and for the exploration of translational/industrial applications.

Youan Xia is the Brock Family Chair and Georgia Research Alliance (GRA) Eminent Scholar at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He received his B.S. degree in chemical physics from the University of Science and Technology of China in 1987, M.S. degree in chemistry from University of Pennsylvania (with Alan G. MacDiarmid) in 1993, and Ph.D. degree in physical chemistry from Harvard University (with George M. Whitesides) in 1996.

His group invented a myriad of nanomaterials with well-controlled properties. These nanomaterials have found use in applications related to plasmonics, electronics, display, catalysis, energy conversion, nanomedicine, and regenerative medicine. As an example, his technology on silver nanowires has been commercialized for the manufacturing of flexible, transparent, and conductive coatings used in applications such as touchscreen display, flexible electronics, and photovoltaics.

Xia has co-authored more than 800 publications in peer-reviewed journals, together with a total citation of more than 180,000 and an h-index of 210. He has been named a Top 10 Chemist and Materials Scientist based on the number of citation per publication. He has received a number of awards, including ACS National Award for Creative Invention (2023), MRS Medal (2017), ACS National Award in the Chemistry of Materials (2013), NIH Director's Pioneer Award (2006), and NSF CAREER (2000). More information can be found at www.nanocages.com.