BEN-ZHONG TANG
Hong Kong University of Science & Technology

AGGREGATION-INDUCED EMISSION: TOGETHER WE SHINE!

Aggregation-induced emission (AIE) refers to a photophysical phenomenon shown by a class of luminogenic materials that are non-emissive when they are genuinely dissolved in good solvents as molecules but become highly luminescent when they are clustered in poor solvents or solid state as aggregates. In this talk, I will present a brief summary on the recent progresses in the area of AIE research. We have conducted mechanistic analyses of AIE processes and unified the restriction of intramolecular motions (RIM) as the main cause for the AIE effects. We have derived RIM-based molecular engineering strategies for the design of new AIE luminogen (AIEgen) systems. Typical examples of the newly developed AIEgen systems and their high-tech applications as optoelectronic materials, chemical sensors and biomedical probes will be presented and discussed.

BEN-ZHONG TANG received BS and PhD degrees from South China University of Technology and Kyoto University, respectively. He conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Toronto. He joined the Department of Chemistry at the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology as an Assistant Professor in 1994 and was promoted to Chair Professor in 2008. He was elected to the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2009.

Dr. Tang has published 700 papers and his work has been cited over 20,000 times, with an h-index of 86. He has been listed by Thomson Reuters as a Highly Cited Researcher in the categories of Chemistry and Materials Science. His work has opened up a new area of research on aggregation-induced emission, which was ranked as one of the Top 100 Research Fronts by Thomson Reuters in 2013. In 2007, Dr. Tang received a State Natural Science Award from the Chinese Government. He is currently serving as Editor of Advances in Polymer Science (Springer) and Associate Editor of Polymer Chemistry (RSC) and sitting in the international advisory boards of a dozen other journals.

For more info about this series: www.chem-eng.utoronto.ca

Websites of Interest

• University of Toronto
• Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering
• Department of Chemical Engineering & Applied Chemistry