
Our paper is now published in Nature Communications!
I am thrilled to announce the publication of our latest paper, ‘Visualizing ultrafast photothermal dynamics with decoupled optical force nanoscopy‘, in Nature Communications! A big shout-out and congratulations to all the authors, and heartfelt thanks to Prof. Catherine Murphy’s and Prof. Yun-Sheng Chen’s teams for their amazing collaboration in making this happen.
Our research is accepted for publication in Nature Communications!
I am thrilled to announce that our recent paper, “Visualizing Ultrafast Photothermal Dynamics with Decoupled Optical Force Nanoscopy”, is now accepted for publication in Nature Communications! This work is in collaboration with Prof. Yun-Sheng Chen at ECE and Prof. Catherine Murphy at Chemistry. Congratulations to Henry (Hanwei) Wang and the coauthors!
Congratulations to Hanwei, Xiaodong, and Josh, for winning the Best Project Award at IEEE Wireless Power Transfer Conference!
I am thrilled to announce that my students, Henry (Hanwei) Wang, Xiaodong Ye, and Josh Yu, have been awarded the prestigious Best Project Award at the IEEE Wireless Power Transfer Conference and Expo! This is an outstanding achievement and a testament to their exceptional talent, creativity, dedication, and teamwork. I am beyond excited and immensely proud of this extraordinary team! Congratulations on this well-deserved recognition!
Yang receives 2023 Engineering Council Outstanding Advisors Award!
Yang is recognized as one of the top 10% of engineering advisors selected by their students!
Our collaborated work is now published in Nature Communications!
We are proud to be part of the groundbreaking research, “Hybrid photoacoustic and fast super-resolution ultrasound imaging”, recently published in Nature Communications! Congratulations to the first author, Shensheng Zhao, and the rest of the team for their outstanding work and contributions. For more details on this exciting development, please visit the following link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-37680-w.
Yang co-organizes MRS Spring Symposium on Plasmonics and Metamaterials
Thank you, Howard Lee, Pin-Chieh Wu, Yao-Wei Huang, for a great conference!
Hanwei receives the prestigious Hong, McCully and Allen Fellowship!
Congratulations to my graduate student, Hanwei Wang, for being awarded the prestigious Hong, McCully and Allen Fellowship! This is a well-deserved recognition of Hanwei’s hard work and dedication to research. We are proud to have Hanwei as part of our team and look forward to seeing the impact of his work. Congratulations again, Hanwei!
Our new preprint on Qi-compatible metasurface is now available on arXiv
Check out our new research on a metasurface that can manipulate the magnetic nearfield distribution with an application to enhance wireless power transfer efficiency under the Qi standard.
Our collaborated work is accepted for publication in Frontiers!
Our new collaborated paper, “Photoacoustic signal enhancement in dual-contrast gastrin-releasing peptide receptor-targeted nanobubbles“, is accepted for publication in Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology! Congratulations to Shensheng Zhao and the coauthors!
New paper published in Photoacoustics!
Our collaborative research, “Understanding the Near-Field Photoacoustic Spatiotemporal Profile from Nanostructures,” is now published in Photoacoustics. Congratulations to Hanwei Wang and the coauthors!

We are hiring!
Prospective lab members should email a CV that summarizes their research skills and interests to Prof. Yang Zhao
Postdoctoral Fellows:
We currently have one position opening for postdocs. Candidates in the fields of optics, nanophotonics, biophysics, and atomic force microscopy are preferred.
Graduate Students:
We are actively looking for exceptionally qualified graduate students with a background in Electrical Engineering, Bioengineering/Biology, Materials Science, and Physics/Applied Physics to join our lab.
Undergraduate Students:
We welcome UIUC undergraduates who are interested in gaining research experience in the areas of biophotonic devices, microscopy, nano-optics and nanophotonics. Please note that we generally discourage short term projects (single semester) since there is a significant amount of training required prior to participating in one of our research programs. Students, who are interested in long-term (two semesters or longer) intensive research projects, are highly encouraged to contact Prof. Zhao.

