Research Professor Dr. Yi-Tao Dai was born in Miluo City, Hunan Province in 1989. He finished the bachelor (Fine Chemical Engineering) and master (Applied Chemistry, Prof. Zhongkui Zhao as supervisor) study at the Dalian University of Technology in 2011 and 2014, respectively. With Prof. Flemming Besenbacher as the main supervisor and Assoc. Prof. Nina Lock as the co-supervisor, he obtained a Ph.D. degree from Aarhus University (Denmark) in April 2018. During his Ph.D. study, he has also stayed at SynCat@Beijing (Prof. Dr. J W (Hans) Niemantsverdriet and Prof. Jian Xu as the directors), Synfuels China Technology Co. Ltd. (Prof. Yongwang Li as CEO) for the project collaboration with Prof. Ren Su and Prof. Xiaodong Wen as the project leaders. Later, from May 2018 to May 2021, he conducted postdoctoral research at the Department of Heterogenous Catalysis (Prof. Ferdi Schüth as the director) in Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung (Germany) with Priv.-Doz. Dr. Harun Tüysüz as the host supervisor. He has been awarded Alexander von Humboldt Fellow in June 2019. From August 2021 until the present, he joined the Suzhou Institute for Advanced Research / School of Chemistry and Materials Science, University of Science and Technology of China.
As the first/co-first author and corresponding author, he has published papers in several top journals such as Nature Synthesis, Science Advances, Nature Communications, Journal of the American Chemical Society, and Angewandte Chemie International Edition. So far, he has published 50 high-level scientific papers with an H-index of 28. He is a member of the International Isotope Society (IIS). He was awarded as Nanoscale 2023 Emerging Investigator. He has been invited as a Youth Editor in the journals of The Innovation and Chinese Chemical Letters. He has been invited as the review expert for NSFC projects. He has given Keynote/Invited talks in several conferences (e.g., the 4th UK catalysis conference, 7th international conference on Modeling in Mechanics and Materials (CMMM), the 13th 2024 IEEE 3M-NANO, the 38th CGCA Annual Conference) and served as special session Chair at the 15th 2026 IEEE 3M-NANO. He was awarded the Provincial Second Prize for Progress in Science and Technology in 2025.
He has built the Isotope Precision Synthesis Laboratory (IPS Lab) in 2022. With the green manufacturing of gram- to kilogram-scale isotope materials (e.g., isotope-labelled pharmaceuticals and polymers) as the main task, IPS Lab design and develop high-efficiency micro/nano-scale catalytic synthetic systems under different energy fields (solar energy Esolar, electric energy Eelectric, thermal energy Eheat, mechanical energy Emech, and bio energy Ebio). The precision and scalable synthesis of isotope materials can facilitate drug discovery, biological mechanism elucidation, and material innovation.
IPS Lab always warmly welcome talented and excellent doctoral and master's students (with physical chemistry, materials chemistry, organic chemistry, inorganic chemistry, and other different disciplines of background) to join us!!!
Are you interested in starting the next stage of your scientific career at a high-level lab for catalysis research with a collaborative atmosphere and state-of-the-art facilities? Just send an email (yitaodai@ustc.edu.cn) and apply for a position as a postdoctoral associate in IPS Lab!!!
Let's travel together in the new world of catalysis and explore novel techniques for energy utilization and isotope-labelled material synthesis!