Dr Zhong Wan is an assistant professor in the Department of Physics at HKU, where he joined the faculty in 2025. From 2018 to 2025, he was a postdoctoral researcher at UCLA. He received his PhD in Physics from Purdue University in 2018 and earned his bachelor’s degree from Jilin University in 2011. Dr Wan’s research focuses on the synthesis and investigation of modular hybrid superlattices composed of van der Waals atomic crystals and functional molecular intercalants. He develops scalable low-temperature assembly techniques to construct artificial layered systems with tunable structural, electronic, and quantum properties. His work explores interfacial phenomena such as chirality, spin–orbit coupling, and topological quantum phases, with applications in quantum information science, correlated electron systems, and low-dimensional quantum devices.