Xiaoyang Zhu is the Howard Family Professor of Nanoscience and a Professor of Chemistry at Columbia University. He received a BS degree from Fudan University in 1984 and a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 1989. After postdoctoral research with Gerhard Ertl at the Fritz-Haber-Institute, he joined the faculty at Southern Illinois University as an Assistant Professor in 1993. In 1997, he moved to the University of Minnesota as a tenured Associate Professor, later a Full Professor, and a Merck endowed professor. In 2009, he returned to the University of Texas at Austin as the Vauquelin Regents Professor and Served as directors of the DOE Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC) and the Center for Materials Chemistry. In 2013, he moved to Columbia University. His honors include a Dreyfus New Faculty Award, a Cottrell Scholar Award, a Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Award, APS Fellow, a Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellow Award from DOD, an Ahmed Zewail Award from the American Chemical Society, and an APS Earle K. Plyler Prize. Among his professional activities, he serves on the editorial/advisory boards of Science Advances, Chemical Physics, and Progress in Surface Science, and as a scientific advisor to the Fritz-Haber-Institute of the Max-Planck Society.