Undergraduate Category

FAN YANG
Johns Hopkins University
Advisor: Xiaobing Wang

Invention: Anti-adherent compounds for contact lenses

Currently, 70 million people around the world wear contact lenses. Up to 20% of those people could end up contracting a lens-inducted infection.  Fan Yang’s strategy is to prevent infection-causing bacteria from adhering to contact lenses by coating the lenses with safe chemicals. 

When Yang was just in the 8^th grade, she interned in a lab.  There, she worked on a project that looked for compounds that could adhere to bacteria. She was interested to discover that some compounds did not adhere.  A few years later, she went to her optometrist for an eye check-up.  She was warned away from contacts because of the possible risk of infection.  Once she arrived at Johns Hopkins, she took these pieces of her past, put them together, and began work on her anti-adherent project using nano-techniques.

Yang, 18, isn’t always sure where her ideas come from.  “Sometimes I feel like they just pop up,” she says.  “Sometimes I’m able to write them down.  Then, I have to sort them out, read literature about them, and research.”  Regardless, when she is working on a problem, she is always excited when she finds a solution.  As she notes, “It means I have finally done something that no one has ever done before.”  Ten minutes later, though, Yang finds herself at work on another problem, facing obstacles again.

When Yang was ten years old, she moved from Peking, China to Davis, California with her mother, Yan-Lei Liu, a laboratory technician at Davis Medical School.  Although young, she remembers her childhood years in China.  “I always like to solve problems,” she says.  “When I was five years old, we didn’t have air conditioning at home.  So, I would open the refrigerator in the summer and sit in front of it to read my books.  My grandmother finally hid and watched me, because she wanted to know why the electric bill was so high.”  In the sixth grade, in the U.S., she remembers becoming interested in microbiology after a school science project that caused her to examine bacteria levels before and after hand washing in order to find the reason why her mother always asked her to wash her hands before eating.

Currently studying biomaterial and nanomaterial engineering, Yang is a sophomore who hopes to attend dental school, and then eventually study for her Ph.D.