How research fellowships helped accelerate my academic career pathway: Low-cost and rapid sensors

Title

Professorial Inaugural Talk – How research fellowships helped accelerate my academic career pathway: Low-cost and rapid sensors

Special Note

This is the first of a new series of professorial inaugural talks series of the ABCP, for celebrating promotions of its Associate Members to a professorial post and ABCP Full Membership and sharing experience with non-professorial academics on how to get promoted towards a professorial post. Such talks are also designed to help inspire Associate Members of ABCP and academics with a similar status to progress further towards being full professors.

Speaker

Professor Zhugen Yang (杨竹根教授), Professor of Biosensing and Environmental Health, Cranfield University; Leverhulme Research Leader; NERC Fellow

Chair

Professor Huiyu Zhou (周挥宇教授), Professor of Machine Learning, University of Leicester

Language

The talk will be delivered in English.

Abstract

Pathogen detection is significant for both biomedical diagnostics (e.g., infectious disease) and environmental analysis, e.g., pathogen contamination in drinking water, SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater for early warning of pandemic). This talk will present a low-cost, deployable paper-based biosensor device for rapid analysis of pathogens for a wide range of application including biomedical diagnosis and wastewater surveillance. It will show the capability of paper-origami device for field-testing in the UK, India and Africa. This device is currently developing to trace the source of pathogens (e.g., SARS-CoV-2) in wastewater for early warning of disease outbreak, supported by UK national wastewater epidemiology surveillance program (N-WESP).

The speaker will also share his personal experience on how he successfully applied for different UK fellowships and how they helped him reach his professorial promotion.

Bio of Speaker

Zhugen Yang is a Professor of Biosensing and Environmental Health at Cranfield University in the UK, leading a UKCRIC-funded Advanced Sensors Laboratory for water-environment-health-nexus. He joined Cranfield University as a Lecturer in 2019 and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2022 and Professor in 2023. He has received three prestigious Fellowships for different career stages, including Leverhulme Research Leadership Awards (2023-2028), UKRI NERC Fellowship (2018-2021), and EU Marie Curie Fellow (2013-15). His independent academic career starts as a Lecturer at the University of Glasgow in 2018 after awarded a prestigious UKRI NERC Independent Fellowship. He completed postdocs at the University of Cambridge, and subsequently at the University of Bath as EU Marie Curie Fellow. He received his PhD from the University of Lyon in France, BEng from Harbin Institute of Technology and MSc from Sun Yat-sen University in China.

His group is developing rapid and low-cost sensors (e.g., paper-origami device) for biomedical diagnostics (e.g., infectious diseases and cancers), public health (e.g., wastewater-based epidemiology), and environmental science (e.g., microbial source tracking, antimicrobial resistance). His research has been sponsored by a variety of sources (>£5.5m, PI on £4m) including UKRI (EPSRC, NERC, BBSRC, MRC), Leverhulme Trust, Royal Society, Royal Academy of Engineering, industrial and governmental sectors (e.g., UKHSA, Home Office, Defra, EA), leading to over 80 referred articles (including Nature Water, PNAS, Nature Communications, h-index = 34 as of September 2023), several UK/PCT patents and a number of invited/keynote talks at international conferences. The key sensor technology has led to a spin-out company at Cranfield. His research has received many national and international awards including a recent Honorable Mention for the James J. Morgan ACS ES&T Early Career Award, featuring in Science and numerous media coverages (e.g., BBC News, Washington Post, etc.). The origami-paper device is currently featured at London Science Museum. He serves as associate editor/guest editor/editorial advisory board members for 10 international journals and chaired the international conference of TTW6 in Oxford in 2023.

How to Participate

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