Professor Guang-Fu Yang, born in 1970, is currently the director of the State Key Laboratory of Green Pesticide at Central China Normal University (CCNU)CCNU. He obtained his PhD from Nankai University in June 1997, then joined CCNU as a lecture in July 1997, and has been a professor since 2001. He served as Assistant President of CCNU from 2014 to 2017, Dean of the College of Chemistry from 2002 to 2014, Director of International Joint Research Center for Intelligent Biosensor Technology and Health since 2018.
For the past three decades, he has committed himself to the discovery and development of pesticides, garnering international recognition as a distinguished pesticide chemist. He developed the first software for pesticide molecular design PDAI (Pesticide Discovery by Artificial Intelligence) by integrating artificial intelligence and high-performance computation. He has an outstanding track record of innovation of six new pesticides (benquitrione, pyraquinate, flubeneteram, fenopyramid, enprocymid, isoflupyram), among which the first-in-class herbicides benquitrione and pyraquinate have been introduced to the sorghum and rice market since 2021 and 2024, respectively. He has over 400 publications in journals including PNAS, Nature Plants, Nature Communications, JACS, Angew Chem Int Ed, JAFC and Pest Management Science with a H-index of 80 and 18000 citations. Evidence of career-long impact is that he is in the top 2% of scientists world-wide as assessed by Stanford University and Elsevier Data. He is the first author of 150 Chinese Invention Patents and 50 International Patents. He received numerous awards and honors, such as the 24th China Patent Gold Award and the first prize of Natural Science of the Ministry of Education. In 2023, he became the Fellow of Chinese Chemistry Society.
