After three years of work, Flinders University Professor Youhong Tang and Chinese University of Hong Kong collaborator Distinguished Presidential Chair Professor Ben Zhong Tang have published three volumes covering a complete ‘Handbook of Aggregation-Induced Emission’ (Wiley).
With 60 chapters in the set, the AIE experts explore foundational and advanced topics covering 20 years of progress in this interdisciplinary field.
Chemistry Professor Ben Zhong Tang is known as the pioneer and leader of the unusual field of AIE photophysical phenomenon, which has found applications in medicine and other fields. Over the past two decades, his research group has explored the abnormal photophysical phenomenon, in which molecular aggregation plays a constructive rather than destructive role in the light emission process. The phenomenon ‘aggregation-induced emission’ (AIE) was coined because the light emission was induced by aggregate formation.
Research groups around the world have been exploring AIE applications to harness the process of non-emissive molecules in solutions which can be induced to emit strongly in the aggregate or solid. The numbers of publications and citations are increasing every year, with being 1,200 and 58,000 respectively in 2017.
At Flinders University, Professor Youhong Tang has embarked on new research applying novel AIE features to bio-sensors and bio-imaging design and manufacture, and associated portable device development. He says research using aggregation-induced emission is also expanding to other areas of materials science, polymer and biological sciences, optoelectronic and photochemistry, as well as synthetic and macromolecular chemistry.
Professor Youhong Tang obtained a PhD at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2007 before moving to Flinders University with an ARC-DECRA scholarship in 2012 from the University of Sydney.
He also contributed to a new article, ‘Visualising the Emerging Platform of Using Microalgae as a Sustainable Bio-Factory for Healthy Lipid Production through Biocompatible AIE Probes‘ (2022) by AHM Mohsinul Reza, Sharmin Ferdewsi Rakhi, Xiaochen Zhu,Youhong Tang and Jianguang Qin which has just been published in Biosensors.