User:Nmillerche/sandbox/Hongjie Dai

Hongjie Dai (born May 2, 1966 in Shaoyang, China) is a Chinese-American Chemist and Applied Physicist, the J.G. Jackson & C.J. Wood Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University. He has been recognized as a leading figure in the study of carbon nanotubes.

Education and career
Dai received a B.S. in Physics from Tsinghua University, Beijing, in 1989, and M.S. in applied sciences from Columbia University in 1991, and a Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Harvard University in 1994 under the direction of Prof. Charles Lieber. After postdoctoral research at Harvard, he joined the Stanford faculty as an assistant professor in 1997.

Biomaterials and medicine
In 2005, Dai's research group proposed a novel method for targeting cancer cells ex vivo by heating them with near-infrared (700-1100 nm wavelengths) radiation. This was accomplished using single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) functionalized with folate groups, which attached somewhat selectively to cancer cells because of their tendency to overproduce folate binding protein (FBP) sites on the cell membrane.

Awards and honors
Among Dai's awards are the American Chemical Society's ACS Award in pure chemistry, 2002, the Julius Springer Prize for Applied Physics, 2004, and the American Physical Society's James C. McGroddy Prize for New Materials, 2006. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009, and to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2011.