Tom is interested in the ways in which biological macromolecules mediate ion transport in living systems to produce emergent functions that enable complex life. Since late 2018, Tom has been working as a postdoctoral fellow in Joanna Aizenberg’s lab at Harvard. There, he and his coworkers designed an electrical power source made of gels and salt that was based on the anatomy of the electric eel and was capable of generating over 100 volts. in chemical engineering under Michael Mayer at the University of Michigan, which he received in 2017 after moving with the group to the Adolphe Merkle Institute in Fribourg, Switzerland in early 2016. Thomas Schroeder 2021 Foresight Fellow in Biologically Inspired EngineeringĪfter receiving an undergraduate degree in chemistry from Northwestern, Tom pursued a Ph.D. In 2020, Yunyan was awarded one of the 2020 IIN Outstanding Researchers Awards by the International Institute for Nanotechnology (IIN) and the 2020 Dream Chemistry Top 5 Prize organized by the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences. In 2018, he was selected to be one of the 2018 PMSE Future Faculty Scholars and honored to participate in the 2018 CAS SciFinder Future Leaders program. At CMU, his research encompassed organometallic chemistry and polymer science, focusing on the rational design of conjugated polymers and the development of controlled methodologies to afford well-defined functional materials using metal-catalyzed cross-coupling reactions. Then he came to the US and earned his PhD degree in Chemistry at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) under the guidance of Professor Kevin Noonan and Tomek Kowalewski. He completed his undergraduate training at Peking University, majoring in Pharmaceutical Sciences. In particular, he worked on harnessing AMPs as precise polyrotaxane synthesizers to produce enthalpically and entropically demanding mechanically interlocked polymers with exquisite control over the number of threaded rings. As a polymer chemist by training, he developed an ever-increasing amount of interest in exploring practical applications of artificial molecular pumps (AMPs), a subset of AMMs, in polymer chemistry and materials science.

Most of his work at NU is to design and harness artificial molecular machines (AMMs) to produce functional polymers and materials in a controlled manner.

Yunyan Qiu is currently a postdoctoral fellow with Sir Fraser Stoddart at Northwestern University (NU), where he researches in the field of molecular machines and related functional materials. Yunyan Qiu 2021 Foresight Fellow in Molecular Machines

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