Peidong Yang

Director, Kavli ENSI; Professor in Department of Chemistry at UC Berkeley; S. K. and Angela Chan Distinguished Chair Professor in Energy at UC Berkeley

Peidong Yang is the director for the Kavli Energy Nanoscience Institute. He is a Professor of Chemistry and the S. K. and Angela Chan Distinguished Chair Professor in Energy at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also a senior faculty scientist in the Materials and Chemical Sciences Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is a member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also the director of the California Research Alliance by BASF.

He is one of the founding members for DOE Energy Innovation Hub: Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP) and served as its north director for the first two years. Yang is an associate editor for Journal of the Americal Chemical Society and also serves on editorial advistory board for a number of journals including Acct. Chem. Res. and Nano. Lett. He was the founder of the Nanoscience subdivision within American Chemical Society. He has co-founded two startups Nanosys Inc. and Alphabet Energy Inc. He is the recipient of MacArthur Fellowship, E. O. Lawrence Award, ACS Nanoscience Award, MRS Medal, Baekeland Medal, Alfred P. Sloan research fellowship, the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Young Investigator Award, National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award, MRS Young Investigator Award, Julius Springer Prize for Applied Physics, ACS Pure Chemistry Award, and Alan T. Waterman Award. According to ISI (Thomas Reuters), Yang is ranked as No. 1 in materials science and No. 10 in chemistry for the past 10 years based on average citation per paper. His main research interest is in the area of one dimensional semiconductor nanostructures and their applications in nanophotonics and energy conversion.

He received a B.S. in chemistry from University of Science and Technology of China in 1993 and a Ph.D. in chemistry from Harvard University in 1997. He did postdoctoral research at University of California, Santa Barbara before joining the faculty in the department of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley in 1999.