Hao Yan

About

Hao Yan studied chemistry and earned his Bachelor’s degree at Shandong University, China. He obtained his PhD in Chemistry under Professor N. C. Seeman at New York University in 2001, working on the design and construction of sequence dependent DNA nanomechanical devices. He then moved to the Computer Science Department at Duke University, where he continued to explore his interests in DNA-based molecular computing and programming. After a three-year period as an Assistant Research Professor at Duke University, he joined Arizona State University as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry in 2004. In 2008, he was promoted with early tenure directly to Full Professor and is currently the Regents Professor and Milton D. Glick Distinguished Professor in Chemistry and Biochemistry, as well as Director of the Center for Molecular Design and Biomimetics in the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University. The theme of Dr. Yan's research is to use nature’s design rules as inspiration to advance biomedical, energy-related, and other technological innovations through the use of self-assembling molecules and materials. He aims to create intelligent materials with better component controls at the molecular level. He leads an interdisciplinary team to design bio-inspired molecular building blocks such as DNA, RNA, and proteins and to program their higher order assembly into systems that perform complex functions. His ultimate goals include engineering an…

Research topics

• Nanotechnology
• Materials science
• Computer Science
• Biology
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computational biology
• Chemistry
• Genetics
• Algorithm
• Biophysics

Selected publications

• DNA origami

  Nature Reviews Methods Primers · 2021 · 721 citations

  DOI

• Meta-DNA structures

  Nature Chemistry · 2020 · 177 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  DOI

• Designer DNA nanostructures for therapeutics

  Chem · 2020 · 167 citations

  DOI

• Inverse design of a pyrochlore lattice of DNA origami through model-driven experiments

  Science · 2024-05-16 · 82 citations

  articleOpen access

  Sophisticated statistical mechanics approaches and human intuition have demonstrated the possibility of self-assembling complex lattices or finite-size constructs. However, attempts so far have mostly only been successful in silico and often fail in experiment because of unpredicted traps associated with kinetic slowing down (gelation, glass transition) and competing ordered structures. Theoretical predictions also face the difficulty of encoding the desired interparticle interaction potential w…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Parallel molecular data storage by printing epigenetic bits on DNA

  Nature · 2024-10-23 · 74 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  DNA storage has shown potential to transcend current silicon-based data storage technologies in storage density, longevity and energy consumption1–3. However, writing large-scale data directly into DNA sequences by de novo synthesis remains uneconomical in time and cost4. We present an alternative, parallel strategy that enables the writing of arbitrary data on DNA using premade nucleic acids. Through self-assembly guided enzymatic methylation, epigenetic modifications, as information bits, can…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• NANO: Combinatorial Self-Assembly of Nanocircuits on Addressable DNA Nanoscaffolds

  NSF · $300k · 2004–2008

• CAREER: DNA Directed Self-Assembly of Multicomponent Nanoarchitectures

  NSF · $400k · 2006–2012

• DNA Origami Nanostructures with Complex Curvatures in 3D Space

  NSF · $400k · 2011–2014

Frequent coauthors

• Yan Liu

  Northeast Forestry University

  190 shared

• Minghui Liu

  Shaanxi University of Science and Technology

  61 shared

• Jaswinder Sharma

  Oak Ridge National Laboratory

  56 shared

• Yonggang Ke

  Georgia Institute of Technology

  53 shared

• Chunhai Fan

  Hebei Medical University

  51 shared

• Neal W. Woodbury

  Arizona State University

  42 shared

• Fei Zhang

  Northeastern University

  40 shared

• Jeanette Nangreave

  Arizona State University

  39 shared

Education

• B.S., Chemistry

  Shandong University, China

  1993

• Ph.D., Chemistry

  New York University

  2001

Awards & honors

• Foresight Institute Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology
• Rozenberg Tulip Award in DNA Computing
• Humboldt Research Award
• Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship
• NSF Career Award

Similar researchers at Arizona State University

• Ana Mooreh-89
• Sidney Hechth-73
• Petra Frommeh-72