Yang Yang (杨扬), Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Biomolecular Science and Engineering Program
University of California Santa Barbara
Email: yang@chem.ucsb.edu
Associate Editor
Organic Letters
Email: yang-office@orglett.acs.org
Google Scholar Profile of Prof. Yang Yang
ORCID: 0000-0002-4956-2034
Education
NIH Postdoctoral Fellow, California Institute of Technology (2020). Advisor: Prof. Frances Arnold
Miller Postdoctoral Fellow, University of California, Berkeley (2018). Advisor: Prof. Jeffrey Long
Ph.D. Organic Chemistry, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2016). Advisor: Prof. Stephen Buchwald
B.S. Chemistry, Peking University (2011). Advisor: Prof. Jianbo Wang
Service
2024-present: alternate councilor, American Chemical Society (ACS)’s Division of Organic Chemistry (DOC)
2024-present: early career advisory board member, Science of Synthesis
2024-present: editorial board member, Tetrahedron
2024-present: editorial board member, Tetrahedron Letters
2024-present: early career advisory board member, Organic Chemistry Frontiers
2022-present: advisory board member, Tetrahedron Chem
2022-present: youth editorial board member, Green Synthesis and Catalysis
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. He earned his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2016 under the mentorship of Prof. Stephen Buchwald. Additionally, he spent a summer in the lab of Prof. Peng Liu at the University of Pittsburgh, exploring computational chemistry. Following his doctoral work, Dr. Yang was an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Prof. Frances Arnold at the California Institute of Technology. Yang started his independent career as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UC Santa Barbara in 2020. He was promoted to Associate Professor with Tenure in 2025. Using an interdisciplinary approach combining synthetic chemistry, synthetic biology, computational chemistry and computational biology, the Yang lab reprograms and reinvents nature’s biosynthetic machineries to access reaction space well beyond the native biochemical landscape. The Yang lab recently coined metalloredox radical biocatalysis (2021) and pyridoxal radical biocatalysis (2023) as general strategies to advance novel enzyme functions not previously known in nature, including those which are unknown in both chemistry and biology.
Awards and Honors
2025 Padwa Lectureship, Emory University
2025 Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award
2025 Novartis Early Career Award
2024 Novartis Chemical Sciences Lectureship, Yale University
2024 Boehringer Ingelheim Lectureship, University of California Los Angeles
2024 Department of Energy (DOE) Early Career Award
2024 Amgen Young Investigator Award
2024 American Chemical Society Division of Organic Chemistry Young Investigator
2024 Stanley and Leslie Parsons Award in Biochemistry
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 (ARO) Young Investigator Award
2023 Thieme Chemistry Journals Award
2022 National Institutes of Health (NIH) Maximizing Investigators' Research Award
2022 National Science Foundation (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