Department of Chemistry · Westfield University
We engineer programmable nanostructures with precisely controlled optical, chemical, and biological properties — advancing diagnostics, drug delivery, and functional materials.
Four interconnected directions in nanoscience
We engineer metal nanoparticles — gold, silver, and platinum — with atomically precise shapes and surface chemistries. By controlling the s…
We design nanocarriers that exploit the enhanced permeability and retention (EPR) effect to passively accumulate in solid tumors, then rele…
Plasmonic nanostructures transduce molecular binding events into optical signals with extraordinary sensitivity — down to single molecules…
Beyond individual particles, we harness the power of self-assembly to build higher-order superstructures — colloidal crystals, liquid cryst…
Our Lab
Selected recent work from the lab
Sara Kim , Luca Ferrari , and Yanan Huang
Nature Materials, 2024
Priya Patel , James Okafor , and Yanan Huang
ACS Nano, 2024
Luca Ferrari , James Okafor , Ethan Brooks , and Yanan Huang
Journal of the American Chemical Society, 2024
Updates from the Yanan Lab
The National Science Foundation has awarded the Yanan Lab a four-year, $1.8 million grant to develop SERS-based biosensors for early-stage cancer detection.
Read more →
Our paper on using DNA scaffolds to assemble gold nanorods into chiral superstructures with programmable optical activity has been published in Nature Materials.
Read more →We warmly welcome Dr. Sara Kim, who joins us from Stanford University where she completed her PhD on DNA-mediated nanoparticle self-assembly.
Read more →We welcome motivated PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, and undergraduates passionate about nanoscience.
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