Prof. Dr. Yi Lu received his B.S. degree from Peking University in 1986, and his Ph.D. degree from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1992. After his postdoctoral research at Caltech, he started his independent career in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1994. He was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2000 and Full Professor in 2004, and endowed Jay and Ann Schenck Professor in 2010. In August of 2021, he moved to the University of Texas at Austin, becoming Robert J.V. Johnson-Welch Regents Chair in Chemistry. He has received numerous research and teaching awards, including the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professors Award (2002), Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2007), Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (2015), Royal Society of Chemistry Applied Inorganic Chemistry Award (2015), Joseph Chatt Award (2020), Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (2021). and Allen Distinguished Investigators (2022). His research interests lie at the interface between chemistry and biology. Specific areas of current interest include biosynthetic inorganic chemistry, biocatalysis and synthetic biology, Bioanalytical chemistry, functional DNA nanotechnology, and gene editing/therapy.