Dr. Zhou Yan obtained his bachelor degree in University of Science and Technology of China in 2003 and MPhil degree in The Hong Kong Polytechnic University in 2005. He got his PhD degree from Prof. Johan Åkerman's group at Royal Institute of Technology (KTH, Sweden) in 2009. Dr. Zhou joined Hong Kong Institute of Technology as assistant Professor in 2010 and then The University of Hong Kong in 2011 as Research Assistant Professor (Area of Excellence Project led by Prof. Fu-Chun Zhang). Dr. Zhou got the prestigious award of “Thousand Talent programme (youth)" in 2015 and became a full Professor in Nanjing University, China. Then he joined The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen (CUHK-SZ) as associate professor in 2016 and promoted to full professor in 2022. Since October of 2020, he has been assistant dean (Research) in School of Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen.
He mainly works on next-generation spintronics devices including spintronic oscillator, Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory, and magnetic skyrmions for information processing and storage application. Dr. Zhou has published more than 200 papers (~100 JCR Q1 journal) including 5 Physical Review Letters, 1 Proceedings of the IEEE, 1 Nature Physics, 2 Nature Electronics, 11 Nature Communications, 1 NPG Asia Materials, and 5 Nano Letters. His GoogleScholar citation is more than 16000, and his H-index is 60. Dr. Zhou received the awards of “China outstanding PhD student abroad”, “Thousand Talents award (Youth)” and “Top 100 citation Badge by Scientific Reports”. His work has been reported by Phys.org, Science daily, IEEE Spectrum, Storage Newsletter etc. Prof. Zhou is a senior member of IEEE and editorial board member of Scientific Reports, Editorial review board member of IEEE Magnetics Letters. He is reviewer of Review of Modern Physics, Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Physics, Nature Materials, Nature Electronics, Nature Communications, Science Advances, Nano Letters, Physical Review X, Physical Review Letters, Physical Review B, Applied Physics Letters and IEEE Transactions on Electronic Devices etc.

In addition to conducting cutting-edge research, he is devoted to high-quality teaching. He was awarded the first “Presidential Exemplary Teaching Award” in CUHKSZ in 2018.
Research Awards:
2024 Second Class Award of Guangdong Science and Technology Prize
2024 Nationally Distinguished Science and Technology Leading Talent
2022 Outstanding Young Researcher Award, CUHK-SZ
2022 Fok Ying Tung Science Award
2021 First Class Award of Shenzhen Science and Technology Prize
2021 Fellow, Institute of Physics, UK
2021-2024 World’s Top 2% Scientists (in terms of both life-long and single year impact)
2020 Presidential Fellow Award, CUHK-SZ
2019 Natural Science Award, Chinese Institute of Electronics, China
2018 Top Cited Author Award, Institute of Physics (IOP), UK.
2018 Outstanding Youth, Pearl River Talent Recruitment Program of Guangdong Province
2018 Outstanding Achievement Award of China Emerging Science and Technology Figures
2015 National Thousand-Young-Talent Award, China
2008 Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Students Abroad, China.