Vivian Yam
Professor Vivian Yam Wing-wah CSci, CChem, FRSC, is a Hong Kong chemist. Yam is the youngest female member ever to be elected to the Chinese Academy of Sciences. She was a 2011 L'Oréal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science laureate "for her work on light-emitting materials and innovative ways of capturing solar energy."
Early years and education
Vivian Wing-Wah Yam was born in British Hong Kong. Her father was a civil engineer, although Yam says that neither he nor her mother steered her toward her career. Yam cites being intrigued by the sight of mercury and a workaholic and pregnant biology teacher who taught her up to the very last minute.Yam attended an Anglican grammar school. She received her B.Sc. in chemistry and PhD degrees at the University of Hong Kong where she was on the badminton team, studying under Chi-Ming Che.
Career
In 1988, she became a junior faculty member at the Department of Applied Science, City Polytechnic of Hong Kong; at the time, there were no facilities at all for teaching chemistry. She helped with establishing the first chemistry books in the library as well as ordering the first beakers and chemicals. Yam's work took her to Caltech in the late 1980s, where she investigated excited state spectrocsopy under Harry B. Gray. After a spell at the University of Rochester in 1990 she went to study at the Imperial College London in 1991 and stayed until 1992. Her research turned to organometallic synthesis "studying the luminescence of complexes with metal–metal interactions". She worked with tetraethyllead which at the time was not a banned additives for petrol. This work was on the border between organic and inorganic chemicals.Yam has been associated particularly with the elements osmium, platinum and ruthenium. She joined the HKU faculty in 2001 where she is the Philip Wong Wilson Wong Professor of Chemistry and Energy. Yam became a Fulbright Scholar in 2007.
Yam was elected to the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2001, aged 38, becoming the youngest female member. The previous holder of this record was, Che, Yam's earlier mentor. She was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World in 2006 and a member of the Foreign Associate of National Academy of Sciences in 2012.