About Me
Assistant Professor at the University of Rhode Island, 2020-present
Postdoctoral Associate and Research Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (with Stephen J. Lippard and Ömer H. Yilmaz), 2013-2020
Ph.D. student at the University of Southern California (with G. K. Surya Prakash and George A. Olah), 2006-2012
Undergraduate student at Zhejiang University (with Ping Lu and Jinbo Hu at SIOC) 2002-2006
Fang grew up in Shenyang, a city in northeast China, and moved to Hangzhou to pursue an undergraduate degree at Zhejiang University. There, Fang became interested in organic chemistry by taking classes with Prof. Ping Lu and working in her lab. He also spent much time, as a visiting undergraduate student, in Prof. Jinbo Hu's lab at Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, exploring organofluorine chemistry.
He moved to the University of Southern California to pursue graduate study with Prof. G. K. Surya Prakash and Prof. George A. Olah. His doctoral research centered on synthetic and physical organic chemistry, with an emphasis on the development of fluoroalkylating methods, key reaction intermediate capture, and the use of fluorinated functional groups in conformational studies.
After obtaining his Ph.D., Fang moved rather far away, both geographically and scientifically. He joined the Lippard lab at MIT to explore topics in bioinorganic chemistry, including the synthetic modeling of protein active sites and the development of fluorescent sensors for detecting mobile zinc. With cancer biologists in the Yilmaz lab at the MIT Koch Institute, he later designed novel platinum complexes exhibiting remarkable activity against chemoresistance.