Ho Yu Au-Yeung obtained his BSc and MPhil degrees in Chemistry from The Chinese University of Hong Kong. After graduation, he studied for a PhD in the group of Prof. Jeremy K. M. Sanders at the University of Cambridge, UK as a Croucher Scholar. He then joined the group of Christopher J. Chang at University of California, Berkeley as a Croucher Postdoctoral Fellow.
Currently
He is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry at The University of Hong Kong. Research interest in his group includes the chemistry of mechanical bond and supramolecular chemistry. In particular, he is interested in the chemistry of catenanes which is a class of compounds consist solely of mechanically interlocked macrocycles. As the mechanical interlocking is a physical entanglement instead of chemical bond, catenanes and other mechanically interlocked molecules possess properties that are unavailable in conventional covalent molecules, such as unusual dynamics, stimuli-responsiveness, propensity to undergo large-amplitude co-conformational change and new topological stereochemistry. Current projects in his group include developing efficient synthetic strategies to access high-order [n]catenanes with multiple interlocked macrocycles, using catenanes and their ring dynamics in host-guest chemistry and new materials, as well as studying the effects of ligand interlocking in transition metal chemistry and catalysis.
