Professor Yi Lu received his Ph.D. degree from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1992. After two years of postdoctoral research at the California Institute of Technology, he joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in 1994. He is now a HHMI Professor in the U of I Department of Chemistry and a part-time faculty member in the Beckman Institute 3D Micro- and Nanosystems group. Professor Lu is also affiliated with the Departments of Biochemistry, Materials Science and Engineering, the Center for Biophysics and Computational Biology, the Biotechnology Center, and the Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology. His fields of professional interest are design and selection of protein and nucleic acid enzymes with potential applications in biocatalysis, sensing and directed assembly of functional biomaterials.
Honors: Biosensors and Bioelectronics Runner-up Award (2002), Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor Award (2002), University Scholar Award (2002), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Campus Award for Excellence in Guiding Undergraduate Research (2003), Camile Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award (1999), University of Illinois SCS Excellence in Teaching Award (1999), National Science Foundation CARRER Award (1995) and Special Creativity Extension Award (1998), Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (1998), Research Corporation Cottrell Scholars Award (1997), and the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Young Investigators Award (1996).