Molecular Beacons

Professor Chaoyong James Yang received his PhD from the University of Florida in 2006 under the supervision of Professor Weihong Tan. After completing his Ph.D. dissertation on molecular engineering of DNA probes for intracellular imaging, he joined Professor Richard Mathies’ group as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley and worked on the development of microfluidic approaches for next generation DNA sequencing. In 2008, he became a faculty member of Xiamen University and now is the Lu Jiaxi Professor of Chemistry in the Department of Chemical Biology at Xiamen University. He won the Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Students Abroad in 2005 and received a DAC Graduate Fellowship from the American Chemical Society in 2005 and Distinguished Faculty Award from the Chinese-American Chemistry & Chemical Biology Professors’ Association in 2012. His current research is particularly focused on molecular engineering, high throughput evolution, and microfluidics.

Prof. Weihong Tan received a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 1993. He was then named a Distinguished Postdoctoral Researcher by the US-DOE and worked at the Ames Laboratory. In 1996, he joined the University of Florida as an assistant professor of chemistry, and was promoted to associate professor (2001), full professor (2003) and distinguished professor (2012). He was named a University of Florida Research Foundation Professor (2004), and V. T and Louis Jackson Endowed Professor (2008 till now). Prof. Tan is also a professor of biomedical engineering and chemistry at Hunan University. He is the Director of State Key Laboratory of Chemo/Bio-Sensing and Chemometrics. Tan’s group has developed research programs in bioanalysis, chemical biology, bionanotechnology, and biomedical engineering. Currently, the Tan group is working on synthesizing a variety of DNA probes for biomedical studies and for DNA nanomotors, indeveloping new nanomaterials and bionanotechnology for bioanalysis, molecular imaging and drug delivery, and in elucidating the molecular basis of diseases such as cancer using a chemical biology approach. His work has been recognized by many awards, including the Pittcon Achievement Award in 2004 and the ACS Florida Award in 2012 for outstanding contributions to chemical sciences. Prof. Tan has published extensively in the field of bioanalysis, chemical biology and bionanotechnology with more than 330 papers with an H-index of 68 and more than 16,000 citations.