Prof. Kai Yan 

School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University

Speech Title:

Electrocatalytic upgrading of biomass-derived chemicals into value-added products

Research Area: 

Catalytic conversion of biomass into value-added chemicals and biofuels 

Electro-and/or photocatalytic energy generation

Photodegration of pollutants

Research Experience:
Dr. Yan is a full professor at Sun Yat-sen University at Guangzhou and worked as Ten Thousand Plan Young Talent of China. His group mainly concentrates on design of environmentally benign nanostructured materials for catalytic transformation of renewable sources into clean energy and value-added products. Dr. Yan’s research interests span the areas of heterogeneous catalysis, electrochemistry, green chemistry, biorefining, materials science and nanotechnology. He started his PhD study at Max-Planck-Institute for Coal Research in 2008 in Germany with the support of Max-Planck-Society Scholarship. He obtained his PhD from RWTH Aachen University in December 2011. After that, he received the Ontario Postdoctoral Fellowship and worked at Lakehead University (Canada) as a postdoctoral fellow in 2012. After that, he joined Brown University as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in December 2013. In 2016, he obtained Hundred Talent Plan from Sun Yat-sen University and joined the university in 2017. Since January 2017, he is the leader of clean energy lab and the associate dean of Guangdong Provincial Lab of Resource Utilization. So far, his group has filed over 15 Patents and published over 85 papers in Angewandte Chem., Applied Catalysis B., ACS Catal., Green Chemistry, Small, Journal of Materials Chemistry A, Chem. Eng. J. et al. He is the associated Editor of three international journals and editorial member of eight international journals. Since coming to Sun Yat-sen University, Dr. Yan has been the recipient of Hundred Talent Award, Science and Technology Award for Ecological Environment, IAAM Medal Award, National Ten Thousand Talent Award from Central Organization Department of China.