Yang Yang (杨扬), Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry (2020-present)
Biomolecular Science and Engineering (BMSE) Program (2020-present)
University of California, Santa Barbara
Google Scholar Profile of Prof. Yang Yang
Education
B.S. Chemistry, Peking University (2011)
Ph.D. Organic Chemistry, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2016). Advisor: Prof. Stephen Buchwald
Miller Postdoctoral Fellow, University of California, Berkeley (2018). Advisor: Prof. Jeffrey Long
NIH Postdoctoral Fellow, California Institute of Technology (2020). Advisor: Prof. Frances Arnold
Email: yang@chem.ucsb.edu
Service
2022-present: advisory board member, Tetrahedron Chem
2022-present: editorial board member, Green Synthesis and Catalysis
2024-present: early career advisory board member, Organic Chemistry Frontiers
Biosketch
Dr. Yang Yang obtained a B.S. in Chemistry from Peking University where he did his undergraduate research with Prof. Jianbo Wang. During his undergraduate years, he also carried out summer research at the University of California, Los Angeles with Prof. Neil Garg. Yang received his Ph.D. degree in Organic Chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the guidance of Prof. Stephen Buchwald. At MIT, his research focused on copper-catalyzed asymmetric hydrofunctionalization of simple olefins. In particular, he developed an enantioselective hydroamination of unactivated internal olefins and a set of methods for the enantioselective addition of olefin-derived nucleophiles to carbonyls and imines. While in graduate school, Yang also spent a summer in the laboratory of Prof. Peng Liu at the University of Pittsburgh, where he used computational tools to elucidate the mechanism of copper-catalyzed olefin functionalization reactions. As an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow working with Prof. Frances Arnold at the California Institute of Technology, through directed evolution, Yang developed an enzymatic platform for the asymmetric amination of primary, secondary, and tertiary sp3 C-H bonds. Yang started his independent career in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UC Santa Barbara in summer 2020. By integrating organic chemistry, organometallic chemistry, enzymology, protein engineering, bioinformatics and computational modeling, the Yang lab is addressing challenging problems in the broadly defined field of synthetic chemistry and catalysis.
Awards and Honors
2024 Sloan Research Fellowship
2024 Bürgenstock JSP Fellowship
2024 CAPA Distinguished Junior Faculty Award
2023 David & Lucile Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering
2023 Army Research Office Young Investigator Award
2023 Thieme Chemistry Journals Award
2022 NIH Maximizing Investigators' Research Award (MIRA)
2022 NSF CAREER Award
2022 ACS Herman Frasch Foundation Agricultural Chemistry Grantee
2022 ACS Petroleum Research Fund New Doctoral Investigator Award
2022 UCSB Faculty Career Development Award
2021 UCSB Regent’s Junior Faculty Fellowship Award
2018-2020 NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein Postdoctoral Fellowship
2016-2018 Miller Postdoctoral Fellowship
2016 Outstanding Self-Financed Chinese Students Award
2015 MIT Chemistry K. Barry Sharpless Travel Award
2011-2012 MIT Moore Fellowship
2011 Undergraduate Research and Scholarly Achievement Award
2010 Ko-Guan Leo Scholarship
2010 Hui-Chun Qin and Tsung-Dao Lee Undergraduate Research Fellowship
2009 National Scholarship of China
2008 National Scholarship of China
2008 Canon Freshman Scholarship