Yifan Wu, Ph.D.

Yifan received her Ph.D. in Chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While at MIT, she spearheaded multi-disciplinary research projects on the design of over ten novel polymer materials, resulting in several first-author publications and a pending U.S. patent application. Such projects included discovering a recyclable heterogeneous catalyst with extraordinarily high and size-dependent catalytic activity for the application of pharmaceutical synthesis and developing a generalizable strategy to synthesize eight amine-functional polymers to remove acidic gases from sour natural gas and biogas.

While completing her undergraduate research at the University of California San Diego, Yifan discovered the first example of a symmetric hydrogen bond in solution for uncharged species and presented her findings at four prestigious conferences. She also received the UC San Diego Physical Sciences Dean's Undergraduate Award for Excellence and was named an ACS Outstanding Senior Undergraduate Organic Chemistry Student.