Zijie Yan was recently appointed assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Clarkson University.

Yan received a dual bachelor of science degree in materials science and engineering and computer science and his master of science in physical electronics from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China.

He received his Ph.D. in materials engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Before joining Clarkson he was a postdoctoral scholar at the James Franck Institute and department of chemistry at the University of Chicago. His studies involved optical trapping and manipulation of plasmonic nanostructures, laser-induced self-assembly (optical matter), laser beam shaping, and electrodynamics simulations.

He performed graduate research in the department of materials science and engineering at RPI, where his work involved laser processing of materials, pulsed laser ablation in liquid, and light-induced chemical reactions. Prior to that, he was a visiting research assistant at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.

Yan has teaching experience as a lecturer for an outreach program at the University of Chicago, where he also was a mentor to undergraduate researchers. He was a teaching assistant at RPI and at Huazhong University of Science and Technology.

He has published papers extensively in scientific journals, including Physical Review Letters, Nano Letters, and Nature Communications.

He has reviewed manuscripts for ACS Nano, Nano Research, Optics Express, Optics Letters, and Applied Physics Letters, and recently served as lead guest editor for a special issue in the Journal of Nanomaterials.

He made presentations at the NSF CaSTL Center Lecture at University of California, Irvine, and gave an invited talk at the Center for Nanoscale Materials, Argonne National Laboratory.

In 2013 and 2014 he made presentations at the SPIE Optics & Photonics Conference in San Diego, and this year at the 2015 MRS spring meeting in San Francisco.