Seminar: New strategies for stereoselective radical biocatalysis

Yang Yang obtained a B.S. in chemistry from Peking University where he did his undergraduate research with Jianbo Wang. During his undergraduate years, he also carried out summer research at the University of California, Los Angeles with Neil Garg. He earned his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in  under the mentorship of Stephen Buchwald. Additionally, he spent a summer in the lab of Peng Liu at the University of Pittsburgh, exploring computational chemistry. Following his doctoral work, Yang was an NIH postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Frances Arnold at the California Institute of Technology.  

Yang started his independent career as an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UC Santa Barbara in 2020. He was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2025. Using an interdisciplinary approach combining synthetic chemistry, synthetic biology, computational chemistry and computational biology, the Yang lab reprograms and reinvents nature’s biosynthetic machineries to access reaction space well beyond the native biochemical landscape. The Yang lab recently coined metalloredox radical biocatalysis (2021) and pyridoxal radical biocatalysis (2023) as general strategies to advance novel enzyme functions not previously known in nature, including those which are unknown in both chemistry and biology.