Yifan is a postdoctoral researcher at the Electron Microscopy for Materials Science in Dr. Sara Bal’s group (University of Antwerp, Belgium). She received her PhD from the Nanjing Normal University in Dr. Yawen Tang’s group. During her PhD candidate period, she was a visiting student at Indiana University working in the group led by Dr. Sara Skrabalak. Yifan was a Research Fellow in the Centre for Bioimaging Sciences at the National University of Singapore, Dr. Utkur Mirsaidov. She joined the Electron Microscopy for Materials Science in 2021 and her research interests are centred on direct visualization of surface ligands by transmission electron microscopy.

Dr. Sara Skrabalak received her B.A. in chemistry from Washington University in St. Louis in 2002 where she conducted research with Professor William E. Buhro. She then moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she completed her Ph.D. in chemistry in fall of 2006 under the tutelage of Professor Kenneth S. Suslick. She then conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Washington – Seattle with Professors Younan Xia and Xingde Li. She is the James H. Rudy Professor of Chemistry at Indiana University – Bloomington and a recipient of both NSF CAREER and DOE Early Career Awards. She is a 2012 Research Corporation Cottrell Scholar, a 2013 Sloan Research Fellow, a 2014 Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar, and 2017 Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellows. In 2014, she received the ACS Award in Pure Chemistry. She is Editor-in-Chief for Chemistry of Materials and ACS Materials Letters. Her research group focuses on nanomaterial design and synthesis (https://skrabalak.lab.indiana.edu/).