Weitao Yang (; born March 31, 1961) is a Chinese-born American chemist who is the Philip Handler Professor of Chemistry at

Duke University Duke University is a private research university in Durham, North Carolina. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco and electric power industrialist James ...

. His main contributions to chemistry include

density functional theory Density-functional theory (DFT) is a computational quantum mechanical modelling method used in physics, chemistry and materials science to investigate the electronic structure (or nuclear structure) (principally the ground state) of many-body ...

development, and its applications to chemistry.

Biography

Yang was born in

Chaozhou Chaozhou (), alternatively Chiuchow, Chaochow or Teochew, is a city in the eastern Guangdong province of China. It borders Shantou to the south, Jieyang to the southwest, Meizhou to the northwest, the province of Fujian to the east, and the Sou ...

Guangdong Guangdong (, ), alternatively romanized as Canton or Kwangtung, is a coastal province in South China on the north shore of the South China Sea. The capital of the province is Guangzhou. With a population of 126.01 million (as of 2020) ...

, China on March 31, 1961. He entered

Peking University Peking University (PKU; ) is a public research university in Beijing, China. The university is funded by the Ministry of Education. Peking University was established as the Imperial University of Peking in 1898 when it received its royal charter ...

in 1978 as part of the first generation of college students after the

Cultural Revolution The Cultural Revolution, formally known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, was a sociopolitical movement in the People's Republic of China (PRC) launched by Mao Zedong in 1966, and lasting until his death in 1976. Its stated goal ...

. He received his BS in chemistry in 1982, after which he studied

theoretical chemistry Theoretical chemistry is the branch of chemistry which develops theoretical generalizations that are part of the theoretical arsenal of modern chemistry: for example, the concepts of chemical bonding, chemical reaction, valence, the surface o ...

as a PhD student with

Robert G. Parr Robert Ghormley Parr (September 22, 1921 – March 27, 2017) was an American theoretical chemistry, theoretical chemist who was a Professor of Chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Career Parr received an A. B. acade ...

at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He completed his PhD degree in 1986, and worked as a postdoc with

(1986-1987) and William H. Miller (1988-1989). Yang currently works in the Department of Chemistry at

since 1990, as Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, Professor, and Philip Handler Professor of Chemistry.

Contributions

Yang's main contributions to theoretical chemistry range from fundamental theory to applications of density functional theory. He (with Parr) developed the concepts of the Fukui function, hardness, and softness in density functional theory. He also justified the theoretical ground of potential functional (as in Optimized-Effective-Potential methods) and fractional-number-of-electron approaches. The Lee–Yang–Parr (shortened to LYP) correlation functional by Yang and his coworkers is extensively used in chemistry and was the second most cited article in chemistry from 1999 to 2006. Yang developed the Divide and Conquer algorithm for linear-scaling density functional theory. In application, Yang also developed methods in

QM/MM The hybrid QM/MM (quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics) approach is a molecular simulation method that combines the strengths of ''ab initio'' QM calculations (accuracy) and MM (speed) approaches, thus allowing for the study of chemical processes ...

simulation for large chemistry and biology systems. His book with Robert G. Parr, ''Density-Functional Theory of Atoms and Molecules'', is considered to be the basic textbook in the field of

Awards and honors

* 1997 Annual Medal of the

International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science The International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science (IAQMS) is an international scientific learned society covering all applications of quantum theory to chemistry and chemical physics. It was created in Menton in 1967. The founding members wer ...

* 1999–2006 The Lee–Yang–Parr correlation energy functional, also known as the LYP functional (Phys. Rev. B 37, 785, 1988) has been the second most cited paper in chemistry for all seven years from 1999 to 2006 since CAS started publishing citation data online. Number of citations is over 25,000. * 2003 Elected a

Fellow of the American Physical Society The American Physical Society honors members with the designation ''Fellow'' for having made significant accomplishments to the field of physics. The following lists are divided chronologically by the year of designation. * List of American Physic ...

. * 2006 Humboldt Research Award for Senior U.S. Scientists * 2010 International Solvay Chair in Chemistry, International Solvay Institutes for Physics and Chemistry, Brussels, Belgium * 2012

American Chemical Society The American Chemical Society (ACS) is a scientific society based in the United States that supports scientific inquiry in the field of chemistry. Founded in 1876 at New York University, the ACS currently has more than 155,000 members at all d ...

National Award for Computers in Chemical and Pharmaceutical Research

Family life

He is married with Helen Wen Yang with two children.personal CV, http://chem.duke.edu/faculty/weitao-yang

References

External links