FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Yong Wang has joined the Department of Physics in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences as an assistant professor.

Wang comes to the University of Arkansas from the University of Toronto, where he was a postdoctoral research fellow supported by the Human Frontier Science Program. Before that, he was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

His research focuses on the interface between physics, nanotechnology and biology. By combining quantitative super-resolved fluorescence microscopy – a technique that won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2014 – with single-molecule fluorescence techniques and statistical physics/modeling, his lab studies biological systems at various scales, ranging from individual biological macromolecules to individual cells or bacteria.

His current research focuses on understanding the mechanism behind the maintenance of antibiotic resistance of bacteria by investigating the spatial and temporal dynamics of plasmids, which are circular extra-chromosomal DNA that commonly carry antibiotic resistance genes in bacteria.

“I believe that life is governed by fundamental laws in physics and that many biological molecules are molecular machines that are able to exert forces, do work and transform energy, among other things,” Wang said. “ I would like to devote my efforts to figuring out how life and nature work from the point of view of physics.”

Wang earned doctoral and master’s degrees in physics from University of California, Los Angeles. He holds a bachelor’s degree in applied physics from the University of Science and Technology of China.