Professor Yongbing Xu, Chair in Nanotechnology, heads the Spintronics and Nanodevice Laboratory. He is the director of the York University-Nanjing University Joint Center in Spintronics and NanoEngineering, and “Qiangren” professor of Nanjing University and guest professor of several other Chinese universities.

His research has been focussed on the fabrication and characterisation of magnetic nanostructures and nanodevices, and in particular magnetic/semiconductor hybrid materials and more recently 2D materials (e.g., Topological Insulators) for spintronics. He has published more than 200 refereed papers in leading academic journals including Physical Review Letters, Nature Communications, Scientific Reports, Nano Letter, Advanced Materials, ACS Nano, Applied Physics Letters and IEEE journals and given many invited talks/seminars at major international conferences including MRS, WUNSPIN, EMN and Intermag.

As principle investigator, Professor Xu has been awarded many research grants from the EPSRC, EU-FP7, STFC, CNSF, the Royal Society, the Yorkshire Forward, the White Rose Consortium and WUN etc. He is leading the Worldwide University Network (WUN) Grand Challenge Project on Spintronics (30 partners from 12 research leading UK, USA & China universities). Prof. Xu was a member of the NSF panel, the international advisory committee of the EU Warsaw NanoCenter, and the panel member of “The Technology and Innovation Future 2020” of the UK Government Science Office. He has been chair of 4 international spintronics conferences and 2 CMMP and Intermag “Roadmap for Spintronics” symposiums. He is the spintronics section editor of “Current Opinion in Solid State and Materials Science” by Elsevier, the series editor of “Electronic Materials and Devices” by Taylor and Francis/CRC Press, editor-in-Chief of “Handbook of Spintronics” by Springer, and edited the very first spintronics book “Spintronic Materials and Technology” by CRC Press. He was winner of the EPSRC Advanced Fellowship award in 2000; and the VC’s outstanding achievement award in 2011. He had interviews with BBC News24 and New Scientists on Spintronics.

Areas of Expertise: Electron Microscopy, Nanotechnology , Spintronics