Rate My Professor Yaowu Hao

Dr. Yaowu Hao is a Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington. He received his Ph.D. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2003. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, he joined the University of Texas at Arlington in 2005. Hao directs the Metal Nanostructures Laboratory and serves on the advisory committee for the Characterization Center for Materials and Bioengineering. His research focuses on the fabrication, characterization, and applications of novel metal nanostructures, including hollow gold nanoparticles, bimetallic core-shell nanoparticles, silver nanodendrites, gold nanovoid arrays, magnetic nanorods, and nanotubes.

Hao's work addresses key challenges in biomedicine and sensing, developing radioactive nanoparticles as internal radiation sources for treating inoperable solid tumors, silver nanodendrites as three-dimensional surface-enhanced Raman scattering substrates for detecting small molecules in liquid and gas phases, gold nanovoid arrays on optical fibers as plasmonic sensors for continuous in-situ monitoring of biomolecules in the bloodstream, and spectral domain phase-sensitive interferometry to observe electrochemical and chemical processes on solid surfaces. Notable publications include 'Theranostic Nanoseeds for Efficacious Internal Radiation Therapy of Unresectable Solid Tumors' (Moeendarbari et al., Scientific Reports, 2016), 'Hollow Gold Nanoparticles as Efficient In Vivo Radiosensitizing Agents for Radiation Therapy of Breast Cancer' (Mulgaonkar et al., 2017), 'Silver Dendrites Decorated Filter Membranes as Highly Sensitive and Reproducible 3D SERS Substrates' (Zhao et al., 2016), 'Capturing Electrochemically Evolved Nanobubbles by Electroless Deposition as a Route to Synthesize Hollow Nanoparticles' (Huang et al., Nano Letters, 2009), and 'Au/Pd Core-Shell Nanoparticles with Varied Hollow Morphologies' (Hsu et al., 2013). He has received funding from the National Institutes of Health, including a $477,000 R15 grant in 2016 for radiotherapeutic nanoseeds and approximately $200,000 in 2019 for cancer research, as well as participation in a 2023 Department of Energy consortium. Hao holds patent CN 107921153 issued in 2021 for a method and apparatus for scanning detection.