Fang Wang

Fang grew up in Shenyang, a city in northeast China, and moved to Hangzhou to pursue an undergraduate degree at Zhejiang University. There, Fang became interested in organic chemistry by taking classes with Prof. Ping Lu and working in her lab. He also spent much time, as a visiting undergraduate student, in Prof. Jinbo Hu's lab at the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, exploring organofluorine chemistry. 

He moved to the University of Southern California to pursue graduate study with Prof. G. K. Surya Prakash and Prof. George A. Olah. His doctoral research focused on synthetic and physical organic chemistry, with an emphasis on developing fluoroalkylating methods, capturing key reaction intermediates, and using fluorinated functional groups in conformational studies. 

After obtaining his Ph.D., Fang moved rather far away, both geographically and scientifically. He joined the Lippard lab at MIT to explore bioinorganic chemistry, including synthetic modeling of protein active sites and the development of fluorescent sensors to detect mobile zinc. With cancer biologists in the Yilmaz lab at the MIT Koch Institute, he later designed novel platinum complexes exhibiting remarkable activity against chemoresistance. 

In 2020, Fang joined the University of Rhode Island Chemistry Department as an assistant professor.