9/8/2025
A Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign professor, Yang Zhao, has earned a prestigious award that will support her pioneering bionanophotonics research program.
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A Grainger College of Engineering professor has earned a prestigious award that will support her pioneering bionanophotonics research program.
Yang Zhao, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering and the Nick Holonyak Micro & Nanotechnology Laboratory, received the highly competitive Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA) for Early-Stage Investigators from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This award, administered by the NIH’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), provides five years of flexible funding. Unlike traditional project-based grants, the MIRA program supports an investigator’s overall research vision, enabling innovative scientists to pursue new, high-impact directions for biomedical science breakthroughs.
“Just as your left hand doesn’t fit into a right-hand glove, nature has a preference for ‘handedness’ at the molecular level,” Zhao explained. “This phenomenon, known as chirality, shapes life’s chemistry—governing everything from how our bodies process drugs to how genetic information is encoded. Yet, it remains one of biology’s most elusive puzzles.”
Chirality, the hidden symmetry that defines whether molecules are left- or right-handed, plays a critical role in health and disease. Life exclusively uses one “hand” of certain molecules, a mystery called homochirality. Unlocking how this molecular twist governs biology could revolutionize disease detection, drug design, and even our understanding of life’s origins on Earth and beyond.
Zhao’s lab will address this challenge by creating a nanoscopic toolbox to probe chirality in living systems with unprecedented precision. Her team will design advanced nanophotonic tools, such as metasurfaces, to enable label-free measurement and manipulation of molecular chirality. With these innovations, scientists will be able to track how chiral macromolecules inside cells change shape, and how even subtle molecular shifts at very low concentrations can alter cellular function, a critical missing link in understanding the origins of many diseases.
“This award empowers my lab to develop tools spanning the nanoscopic to microscopic scales that allow us to watch molecules at work inside living cells, without the need for labels,” Zhao said. “Our goal is to equip biologists with new ways to uncover how these molecular-level chirality changes drive health and disease.”
The five-year research program will be carried out at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in the Nick Holonyak Micro & Nanotechnology Laboratory and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. Zhao also holds affiliations with the Cancer Center at Illinois, the Department of Bioengineering, the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, and the Carle Illinois College of Medicine.