Zijie Yan honored as creative and kind, with interests from cooking to nanoparticles. He was a leader in his field and a great mentor and father, his former colleagues say.
, is being remembered as a creative force who was generous with his time and talents in both his professional and personal life.
“He was a positive person and he had a great deal to offer,” Chrisey, a physics professor who’s now the chair of materials engineering at Tulane University, said. “There’s no reason why it makes sense for it to be him. I can’t imagine he ever said a cross word to me, even once.” After earning his Ph.D from RPI, Yan completed his postdoctoral studies at the University of Chicago in 2015. He went on to become an assistant professor at Clarkson University, before eventually making his way to UNC.
“I always found interacting with him to be both really rewarding, but also the challenging process. And both of those things are what it should be,” Scherer said. “He was always really well prepared. And his ideas are very clearly thought out. … We would really bounce around and, in the positive sense, critique ideas. There was a lot of back and forth. It was a wonderful working relationship.”
“What I observed in how Zijie works is that he was very patient and devoted himself to people who were trying, even if they weren’t aspiring to his level of ability and insight, that if they tried, then he would really work diligently with them,” Scherer said.
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