Yunlong Zhao

Dr Yunlong Zhao is an Associate Professor at the Dyson School of Design Engineering, Imperial College London, leading the Electrochemical and Bioelectronic Interface Group (https://www.imperial.ac.uk/zhao-group/). He also holds a joint appointment at the UK National Physical Laboratory (NPL) as a Senior Scientist. Yunlong carried out his postdoctoral and doctoral research at the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University, where he conducted research in bioelectronic materials and devices, and nano-bio interface. He also received his undergraduate and postgraduate research training at the Wuhan University of Technology, with a focus on electrochemical energy storage and electrochemical probing.

Yunlong gained highly multidisciplinary research experience in material science, electrochemistry, electrophysiology, electronic engineering, biomedical engineering and nano-bio interface. His research philosophy is to identify key challenges/problems in complex electrochemical and biomedical systems by rationally designing and engineering devices capable of simulating, monitoring and regulating complex electrochemical and physiological processes, performing root cause analysis and proposing innovative solutions/optimisation strategies for the applications in Sustainability, Future Electronics and Healthcare.

Yunlong has developed a series of novel bioelectronics, sensors, energy storage devices, and their integration into 2D on-chip and 3D soft systems for the in-depth studies of electrophysiology and electrochemical energy storage, with over 90 publications published in peer-reviewed journals such as Nature, Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Materials, Nature Communications, Nature Reviews Materials, PNAS, etc. with a total citation over 10,000. His work has attracted widespread attention from academics, the media and industries. Due to his academic contributions, Yunlong has received numerous prestigious awards, e.g., the Second-Class Prize of the State Natural Science Award, the Wiley-VCH Rising Stars, and the Top 5 finalist for the USERN prize, etc.

He currently leads the Electrochemical and Bioelectronic Interface Group at Dyson School of Design Engineering. Additionally, he is a member of the Electrochemical Science and Engineering Group and the Centre for Processable Electronics at Imperial, as well as the Electronic and Magnetic Materials Group at NPL.

Research interests
1. On-chip and flexible implantable devices for electrochemical and physiological interrogation.
2. Advanced electrochemical energy storage technologies for Sustainability and Future Electronics.
3. Wearable and implantable bioelectronics for Healthcare and the Human-Machine Interface.
4. Micro-power sources and bioelectronics integrated 3D soft system.