Carolina Distinguished Professor Qian Wang has been described as a “gifted teacher” by colleagues.
Wang, who was awarded the 2024 Carolina Trustees Professorship in Public Health, Engineering, Medical Sciences and Sciences, says his teaching methods simply are to reach his students where they are.
“The student population changes a lot,” Wang says. “The way they study is very different today from 20 years ago. You have to be very current.
“Sometimes you want to follow their trend to get their attention.”
Wang has been teaching at the University of South Carolina since 2003 and has been chair of the chemistry and biochemistry department since 2023, leading a department with more than 40 faculty members and more than 150 graduate students.
“Qian quickly gained the trust and support of all faculty, staff and students with his caring personality and effective leadership skills,” says John H. Dawson, Carolina Distinguished Professor emeritus and former chair of the department. “Qian has been an outstanding researcher, an excellent scholar, a gifted teacher and a skillful leader at the University of South Carolina.”
In his research, Wang studies the hierarchical assembly of proteins and protein nanoparticles for applications in chemistry, materials and biomedicine, authoring more than 290 publications in peer-reviewed journals.
“Your graduate students not only learn knowledge from you, but they also want to learn how to do research from you. You can reshape your teaching style to teach them how to do research based on their own need. I think that's something that is really a learning process together.”
Wang says he became interested in chemistry through his parents, who were both chemistry teachers in his rural hometown in China.
“That was the first thing — the thing that brought me into chemistry,” Wang says. “And then, the more you know and get involved in it, the better you are.”
He earned his undergraduate and doctoral degrees at Tsinghua University in China and did post-doctoral work at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California.
He came to USC, in part, because of the strong chemistry program and the willingness of colleagues to collaborate across disciplines.
“That provides me the unique opportunity to develop my own projects,” Wang says. “My research really crosses disciplines from organic chemistry to biochemistry, biomaterials, nanomaterials, drug delivery and tissue engineering.
“So some other traditional chemistry departments may not embrace my research. They will think I'm doing something too foreign. But here, when I present my research ideas to colleagues, they really love that.”
In working across disciplines, Wang often becomes the student, learning about areas that are not his expertise. That also applies when he is working with graduate students who may have different areas of expertise but still have lessons to learn.
“Your graduate students not only learn knowledge from you, but they also want to learn how to do research from you,” Wang says. “You can reshape your teaching style to teach them how to do research based on their own need. I think that's something that is really a learning process together.”