Yuanning Feng

Yuanning Feng was born in Dandong, Liaoning, and grew up in Shenzhen, Guangdong, China. After obtaining the gold medal in the Chinese Chemistry Olympiad Final, he started his undergraduate studies at Tsinghua University in 2012. Yuanning worked on organic synthesis and supramolecular self-assembly in Professor Mei-Xiang Wang’s group at Tsinghua University from 2013 to 2015. He received the Tsinghua Xuetang Fellowship, which financially supported him to work as an Undergraduate Visiting Scholar in Professor Jonathan Sessler’s group at the University of Texas at Austin. In 2016, he completed his BSc Degree in Chemical Biology under the supervision of Professor Xi Zhang with a research project on supra-amphiphiles. After that, Yuanning joined Nobel Laureate Professor Fraser Stoddart’s group at Northwestern University, working on artificial molecular machines, and graduated with a PhD Degree in 2021. During his PhD studies, he spent his time with Professor Douglas Philp (University of St Andrews), working on a supramolecular polymer incorporating systems chemistry, and he worked as a postgraduate visiting scholar at the University of New South Wales. Yuanning expanded his interests into interdisciplinary research while working as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Stoddart Group, fusing concepts in organic synthesis, supramolecular chemistry, polymer science, biomedical engineering, and nanotechnology.

Yuanning started his independent research career as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Oklahoma (OU) in 2023. He is serving as the 2025 Chair for the Oklahoma Section of the American Chemical Society. Yuanning has published 55 articles in high-impact journals, including two in Science, two in Nature, and 20 in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. He has given 90 presentations at multiple conferences and seminars. He has been a recipient of the OU Junior Faculty Fellowship, CAS Future Leader Top 100, the International Institute for Nanotechnology Outstanding Researcher Award, the Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-Finance Students Abroad, and the Foresight Institute Distinguished Student Award.