Rate My Professor Yuan Chen

Professor Yuan Chen is Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, at the University of Sydney. He earned a bachelor's degree from Tsinghua University and a Ph.D. from Yale University. From 2005 to 2015, he held positions as Assistant Professor and Associate Professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore before joining the University of Sydney in 2015. He leads the Advanced Carbon Research Lab, where his team develops scalable processes for synthesizing carbon materials—including carbon nanotubes, graphene, graphite, carbon black, hard and soft carbons, porous carbon, activated carbon, and carbon fibers—with controllable structures and low greenhouse gas emissions. These materials are assembled into functional macroscale composites for sustainable energy storage, electrocatalysis, carbon dioxide utilization, and environmental applications.

Professor Chen's research translates the superior properties of carbon nanomaterials into practical solutions for a sustainable future, including novel catalytic processes for carbon dioxide reduction as part of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Green Electrochemical Transformation of CO2, where he serves as Theme 2 Lead and University of Sydney Node Director. He has secured major funding through an ARC Future Fellowship and an ARC Industry Fellowship. His contributions include highly influential publications such as 'Antibacterial activity of graphite, graphite oxide, graphene oxide, and reduced graphene oxide: membrane and oxidative stress' (2011), 'Scalable synthesis of hierarchically structured carbon nanotube-graphene fibres for capacitive energy storage' (2014), 'A review of rechargeable batteries for portable electronic devices' (2019), 'Structural transformation of highly active metal–organic framework electrocatalysts during the oxygen evolution reaction' (2020), and 'Lateral dimension-dependent antibacterial activity of graphene oxide sheets' (2012). Professor Chen serves as an editor for Carbon (Elsevier) and Journal of Alloys and Compounds, and has chaired the Australian Carbon Society and Asian Association of Carbon Groups since 2017/2018.