Prof. Hong Yang received his B.Sc. degree from Tsinghua University (1989), M.Sc. degree from University of Victoria (1994), and Ph.D. degree from University of Toronto (1998).  After working at Harvard University as an NSERC postdoctoral fellow, he started his independent research and rose through the academic ranks at University of Rochester before joining the faculty of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in January, 2012. Dr. Yang is an NSERC Canada Doctoral Prize winner and an NSF CAREER Award recipient. He is a Section Editor on Nanotechnology for Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering and serves on the Editorial Board of Nano Today and other journals. His research interests include shape control of nanocrystals, surface modification, catalysis, and nanomaterials for energy and biological applications.