“Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what nobody else has thought”

Our group was established in 2006, which is now affiliated to the department of polymer science and engineering at Zhejiang University. Our team members include Prof. Ben Zhong Tang (Membership of the Chinese Academy of Sciences), Prof. Jing Zhi Sun and Prof. Haoke Zhang.

Our research interests mainly focus on four directions: I) Aggregation-Induced Emission (AIE), mechanistic study, molecule design, and application development (such as optoelectronics devices, sensors, bio-imaging, and theranostics); II) The chemistry of the acetylenic polymerization; III) Clusterization-Triggered Emission (CTE) from non-conjugated structures; IV) Investigating the relationship between aggregation and chiroptical properties.

The AIE effect was coined by Tang’s group in 2001 and now our group is spearheading the research on AIE. Currently, more than 80 countries and 2000 institutes are working on AIE and Thomson Reuters listed “AIE” as the rank 2 research front in chemistry and materials science in 2015. Because of its worldwide impact on basic and applied science, the 2017 State Natural Science Award (1st Class) was awarded to the “Aggregation-Induced Emission”.