Sapientia Eminence Professorship

In a ground-breaking after-dinner talk titled "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom", at the American Physical Society meeting on December 29, 1959, Richard Feynman stated that all of the Encyclopaedia Britannica would fit on the head of a pin. 

It would, of course, Feynman told his audience, involve reducing “all the writing in the Encyclopaedia by 25,000 times”. The physicist was theorising about the possibilities of manipulating matter at the atomic level. And while his speech is widely considered to be the conceptual birth of nanotechnology, the term itself was coined in 1974 by Norio Taniguchi to describe a field of science and engineering.

Since then, nanotechnology has advanced rapidly in both complexity and use. The Cambridge Dictionary describes it as “an area of science that deals with developing and producing extremely small tools and machines by controlling the arrangement of separate atoms”. Scientists in this field manipulate individual atoms and molecules and work with dimensions and tolerances of less than 100 nanometres.

Professor Hongjie Dai is the Sapientia Eminence Professor and Professor, Chair of Chemistry at the Department of Chemistry, The University of Hong Kong (HKU). Professor Dai’s work is highly interdisciplinary, bridging chemistry, physics, materials and biomedical sciences, and his research group has been a leader in the area of nanoscience, nanotechnology and nanomedicine.

Professor Dai has made seminal contributions to the fields of nanoscience and nanomedicine, including the synthesis of carbon nanotubes (CNT) and graphene nanoribbons, elucidating fundamental physics in these quasi-one-dimensional systems and opening new applications of these materials in biomedical and renewable energy fields.

His lab has pioneered carbon-based nanoscience over a number of years including ballistic CNT based field-effect transistors and CNT nanoelectronics sensors, CNT based drug delivery and photothermal therapy, and graphene nanosheets based nanomedicine. His group also pioneered NIR-II/SWIR (Near-infrared-II/short wave infrared) biological imaging in 2009.

In the renewable energy area, Professor Dai’s group devised ‘strongly coupled carbon-inorganic hybrid materials’ by growing electrocatalyst and battery material on CNTs and graphene in a solution phase, leading to advanced electrochemical properties for water splitting, O2 and H2 reduction and batteries. They have also invented a rechargeable Al battery, and Li/Cl2 and Na/Cl2 batteries.

Professor Dai’s Current research in nanomaterials includes the synthesis of novel nanomaterials in 0D (nanoparticles, quantum dots), 1D (wires and tubes) and 2D (sheets) with interesting physical, physiochemical and catalytic properties. He is also investigating spectroscopy and microscopy characterisation using advanced analytical tools.

In the field of nanomedicine and bioengineering, Professor Dai pioneered NIR-II/SWIR fluorescence imaging in 2009 by detecting the intrinsic fluorescence of CNT in vivo, subsequently developed a series of NIR-II emitters including sulfide based quantum dots, donor-acceptor-donor molecules and down-conversion rare earth nanoparticles, and advanced light sheet microscopy and confocal microscopy in NIR-II/SWIR.

Professor Dai joined HKU in September 2023 with joint appointments in Materials Engineering and the School of Medicine. At the same time, he also became the J G Jackson and C J Wood Professor of Chemistry, Emeritus at Stanford University, transitioning from his previous role as a full professor. 

Professor Dai is a Member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the US National Academy of Medicine, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Foreign Member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He received the APS James McGroddy Prize for New Materials, the ACS Pure Chemistry Award, the MRS Mid-Career Researcher Award, the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, and the Humboldt Research Award, among others.