Yuanyuan Zhou is the Head of the Department of Materials and Associate Director of the Energy Institute at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), where he serves as a tenured Full Professor jointly appointed in the Department of Materials and the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering. （HKUST is ranked among the world’s top 40 universities, and its materials science discipline among the global top 50 in the QS World University Rankings.)

 

As the sole or lead corresponding author, he has published 15 papers in Science and the Nature family of journals. His work has received more than 17,000 Google-Scholar citations, with an H-index of 65, establishing him as a leading scholar in perovskite semiconductors and photovoltaics. He serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Energy Chemistry and as an Advisory Board Member of Cell Press journals, including Device, Matter & Light, and Chem Circularity. He is also Chair of the Photovoltaic Technical Committee of the IEEE Electron Devices Society.  

He has led major research projects supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), the Hong Kong Research Grants Council (RGC), and the U.S. National Science Foundation, including the NSFC Excellent Young Scientists Fund (Hong Kong and Macao), the NSFC/RGC Collaborative Research Scheme, and several other major competitive grants. He has also secured tens of millions of RMB in industrial funding from a Global 500 company to advance the translation and commercialization of emerging semiconductor materials and photovoltaic devices. He established Hong Kong’s first pilot-scale manufacturing platform for perovskite photovoltaic modules.

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He has mentored several students and postdoctoral researchers who have now secured independent PI and faculty positions at leading universities, including City University of Hong Kong, Jilin University, Northwestern Polytechnic Univeristy,  and Chinese Academy of Science. 

 

He has mentored a number of students and postdoctoral researchers who have gone on to establish independent research careers as principal investigators and faculty members at leading institutions, including City University of Hong Kong, Jilin University, Northwestern Polytechnical University, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

 

Prof. Zhou’s research group, ΣLab, innovates not only in semiconductors and devices, but also in the ways they are studied. The group’s research centers on three interconnected areas:

• Microstructures of perovskite materials and devices

• Multimodal characterization

• Artificial intelligence for materials microstructures

 

ΣLab has pioneered the understanding and engineering of microstructural disorder in perovskite materials and devices. Its recent advances have been published in leading scientific journals, including Science, Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Photonics, Nature Chemistry, Nature Energy, and Nature Synthesis.

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Outside of research, teaching, and administrative responsibilities, Zhou is a devoted husband and father. He enjoys supporting his wife, a computational geneticist, in her scientific pursuits and nurturing his daughter’s and son’s curiosity about the world around them—from the macroscopic to the microscopic.