Yushan Yan, Distinguished Professor of Engineering at the
University of Delaware, is known worldwide for using nanomaterials to solve
problems in energy engineering, environmental sustainability and electronics.
His early academic work focused on zeolites, porous rock
with a well-defined, crystalline structure. At the atomic scale, their pore
size is so precisely decided that zeolites can separate molecules with size
differences of merely a fraction of an angstrom (one-tenth of a nanometer),
making them useful to the chemical and petroleum industries as molecular sieves
for separation and catalysis processes.