Yonggang Ke

Yonggang Ke is an Associate Professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University. His work in Biology centers on DNA nanotechnology and programmable self-assembly of DNA-based nanomaterials. Dr. Ke earned his PhD in Chemistry from Arizona State University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, affiliated with the Department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School. He joined the joint Georgia Tech-Emory program in 2014 as an Assistant Professor, advancing to Associate Professor, and leads the Ke Lab for Biomolecular Nanoengineering. He is also a member of the Discovery and Developmental Therapeutics Research Program at the Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University and holds memberships in the International Society for Nanoscale Science, Computation and Engineering, the Materials Research Society, and the Biomedical Engineering Society.

Ke's highly interdisciplinary research combines chemistry, biology, physics, materials science, and engineering to create nucleic acid-based nanostructures and nanodevices for applications in molecular biophysics, therapeutics, materials science, nanophotonics, drug delivery, and tissue engineering. His lab develops new paradigms for DNA self-assembly to build complex structures; designs DNA nanostructure-based imaging and drug delivery systems; engineers nanodevices for single-molecule studies and biological questions; and fabricates DNA-templated protein devices for bioreactors. In cancer research, DNA/RNA nanostructures are used for targeted delivery and molecular-level cancer cell studies. He received the Billi and Bernie Marcus Research Award from Winship Cancer Institute in 2014. Notable publications include "Three-dimensional structures self-assembled from DNA bricks" (Science, 2012), "Programmable self-assembly of three-dimensional nanostructures from 10,000 unique components" (Nature, 2017), "Self-assembled DNA nanostructures for distance-dependent multivalent ligand–protein binding" (Nature Nanotechnology, 2008), "Polyhedra self-assembled from DNA tripods and characterized with 3D DNA-PAINT" (Science, 2014), "Modulating transformation of DNA origami nanoarray via sequence design" (Nature Communications, 2025), and "Expanding DNA alphabet adds a previously unknown dimension to nanostructures" (Science Advances, 2026).