Dr. Zijie Yan, prolific, resilient and generous scientist, killed in UNC shooting

Teddy Rosenbluth
·2 min read
8

A stunned academic community mourned Zijie Yan Tuesday, describing the UNC physics professor slain on UNC-Chapel Hill campus as an enthusiastic scientist and outgoing friend.

Yan, 38, was identified as the victim in Monday’s shooting at Caudill Laboratories in arrest warrants filed in Hillsborough, where his graduate student Tailei Qi is being held on charges of first-degree murder.

Tributes poured in Tuesday from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where Yan had studied, and from Tulane University, where Doug Chrisey, his former advisor, recalled publishing 17 papers with Yan while his student was still learning English at RPI.

“He would knock on my door with incredible experimental results and a huge smile,” Chrisey wrote. “He would leave feeling he didn’t understand anything about the nucleation and growth of nanoparticles, but still with a huge smile.”

Yan left Clarkson University in upstate New York in 2019 to join UNC-Chapel Hill faculty. He ran a lab in the Department of Applied Physical Sciences with two undergraduate students, one research assistant and three PhD students, including Qi.

Just last year, the Yan Research Group congratulated Qi on publishing his first paper, and UNC had promoted his work on “optical tweezers” earlier this month.

Researcher and teacher

Yan came from Jingmen in Central China and received his undergraduate and master’s degrees at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, according to a Watertown Daily Times article. He lived in Apex and had two young children.

He was scheduled to teach an undergraduate engineering course this fall on fundamental and applied materials science, according to a UNC course catalog.

“Our research goal is to transcend the boundary between photonics and materials science by developing new techniques to control light-matter interactions at the nanometer scale,” his website stated.

But colleagues hesitated to focus on his university accomplishments rather than “the beautiful person” they lost.

“He was a great cook and would cook for all his roommates wherever he lived,” Chrisey wrote. “His microwaved lunches were the ones you wanted to steal. He was a very sweet man and I am devastated that his life ended needlessly from gun violence.”

A North Carolina State Trooper surveys the area outside Caudill Laboratories on the first floor of the building where a bullet broke a window on Monday, August 28. 2023 in Chapel Hill, N.C. The building on the University of North Carolina campus is believed to be the site of a shooting that forced the campus into lock down for several hours on Monday afternoon.

A campus in mourning

In a message to the UNC campus the day after Yan was killed, Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz said he had met with Yan’s colleagues and family to express condolences on behalf of the university.

UNC at 1:02 pm on Wednesday, Aug. 30, will ring its Bell Tower in honor of Dr. Yan, he announced.

“I encourage every member of our campus community to take a moment of silence during this time,” the chancellor said. “This is an important way that we can come together as a community to recognize the loss we feel and to support one another.”