Yang Gan obtained his BE from Sichuan University (1995), and both his ME (1998) and PhD (2001) from Institute of Metal Research of Chinese Academy of Sciences. Before joining Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT) in 2006, he took postdoctoral and visiting scholar positions at the University of Science and Technology Beijing, Newcastle University and Melbourne University. His research interests are surface physical chemistry and surface engineering. He contributed 60+ publications and patents. He won the Frans Habraken Best Paper Award (2013) and the HIT Teaching Excellence Award (2014). He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) in 2015.