Ben Zhong Tang and Aggregation-Induced Emission (AIE): Another HKUST Chemist Who Went from Material Discovery to Glory

A thin-layer chromatography plate, a student's report that "the solution doesn't emit light," and an associate professor of chemistry puzzling over crystals he remembered glowing from his own doctoral days. Two decades later, that puzzle had become a first-class State Natural Science Award — awarded barely ten years after he was promoted to Chair Professor at HKUST.

In one sentence: Ben Zhong Tang (唐本忠, b. 1957) is Chair Professor of Chemistry at HKUST, where he taught from 1994 to 2021^※. During that period he proposed the concept of aggregation-induced emission (AIE) in 2001, was elected a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2009, and led the project that won the first-class State Natural Science Award for 2017 (conferred in January 2018).

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# Who is Ben Zhong Tang, and why is he called the "father of AIE"?

Tang is a polymer chemist who joined HKUST in 1994 and rose from Assistant Professor through Associate Professor and Professor to Chair Professor, eventually holding the Stephen Kam-chuen Cheong Professorship of Science^※, a tenure that lasted until 2021. He is known in academic circles as the "father of AIE" because his laboratory at HKUST first proposed the original scientific concept of "aggregation-induced emission" (AIE) in 2001^※. Conventional fluorescent materials "quench" — their emission dies — when molecules concentrate and aggregate; Tang's team found a class of molecules that does the opposite: the more they aggregate, the brighter they glow.

That discovery later left the lab bench and became a designable principle of materials science. While Tang was still on the HKUST faculty, it earned two national honours: a second-class State Natural Science Award (2007) followed by a first-class one (2017). The table below gives his basic profile at a glance:

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# From a Toronto postdoc to an HKUST assistant professor: how did Tang's early path lead to Hong Kong?

Tang's research career got off to a late start. By his own account, "from second grade all the way through high school graduation, I never really studied properly^※". After finishing high school in 1974, he was sent to the countryside under the down-to-the-countryside movement, doing hard manual labour such as digging rivers, until the gaokao — mainland China's university entrance exam — was reinstated in 1977 and he was admitted to the Department of Heavy Chemical Engineering at Guangdong Institute of Chemical Engineering (later merged into South China University of Technology)^※. After earning his bachelor's degree in 1982, he went to Japan, completing a master's (1985) and then a doctorate (1988) in polymer chemistry at Kyoto University^※.

After his doctorate, Tang did not settle down in one place. From 1989 to 1994 he did postdoctoral research at the University of Toronto, moving through four different research groups in succession^※ — a period he later recalled as "very painful; I worked desperately hard wherever I was, yet I kept having to switch direction." That rootlessness, ironically, forged the breadth that would later let him straddle polymer synthesis and luminescent materials. In 1994 he formally joined the HKUST Chemistry Department as Assistant Professor^※, putting down roots at a university that was then only three years old, and staying for twenty-seven years.

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# What exactly happened in the HKUST laboratory in 2001? How was the AIE concept stumbled upon "by accident"?

Tang himself describes the discovery of AIE as "a serendipitous beautiful encounter^※". The story begins plainly: he asked a student to synthesise a series of silole derivatives, and one day the student reported that a particular silole derivative's solution did not emit light under UV irradiation. That remark set Tang wondering — he clearly remembered that the hexaphenylsilole crystals he had made during his doctoral studies did glow. Puzzled, supervisor and student ran repeated checks and eventually confirmed that both observations were correct: for the same molecule, individual molecules in dilute solution do not emit, but when they aggregate into a solid state they do^※.

This anomaly was written up and published in Chemical Communications in 2001 under the title "Aggregation-Induced Emission of 1-Methyl-1,2,3,4,5-pentaphenylsilole"^※ — the first time the term "aggregation-induced emission" (AIE) entered the academic literature. That two-page paper would come to be regarded as the founding work of a new research field. Tang later summed up the methodology behind such discoveries: "If the phenomenon you observe and the results you obtain cannot be explained within the mainstream paradigm… you should keep pursuing it, because you may be standing at the threshold of a major discovery^※".

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# What scientific problem does AIE actually solve? Why does the Chinese Academy of Sciences say it "overturned sixty years of received wisdom"?

Before AIE was proposed, the field of luminescent materials had long been plagued by "aggregation-caused quenching" (ACQ): dye molecules emit beautifully in dilute solution, but as concentration rises and molecules pack together, emission efficiency plummets or is extinguished altogether. For applications that need luminescent materials in concentrated or solid thin-film form — display devices, biological imaging — this was a fundamental obstacle. Conventional fluorescent probes perform superbly when detecting low-concentration targets, yet fail precisely in the high-concentration regime where signal enhancement is most needed.

Tang's AIE materials turn the logic upside down: in dilute solution the molecules dissipate energy through intramolecular motion and do not emit, but once aggregated, intramolecular rotation and vibration are restricted and the energy is instead released as light — the higher the aggregation, the brighter the glow. In its official reading of the achievement, the Chinese Academy of Sciences website praised AIE for "overturning sixty years of received wisdom^※" and "opening an entirely new direction and field^※", adding that AIE materials "make high-quality in vivo imaging and highly sensitive online sensing and monitoring easier^※" and could replace conventional commercial fluorescent probes across many scenarios.

HKUST's official "impact case" page reports that more than 200 high-performance fluorescent materials based on the AIE principle have been developed, with nearly 100 patents filed^※, spanning biological imaging, food safety, healthcare, electronic displays and forensic science — application areas that are, for the most part, precisely the "blind spots" of traditional ACQ materials.

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# From the 2007 second-class award to the 2018 ceremony: how did Tang's national honours accumulate at HKUST?

It took more than one step for AIE to go from a single paper to a nationally recognised scientific achievement. For 2007, Tang's team project "Molecular Design of New Aggregation-Induced Emission Materials" had already received a second-class State Natural Science Award, and Tang personally was also given the Chinese Chemical Society's Wang Baoren Award for Fundamental Research in Polymers^※ — AIE's first national-level scientific honour, though still a decade away from becoming an internationally recognised field of research in its own right.

Ten years on, the accumulated work in the same direction earned a higher grade of recognition. In the 2017 State Natural Science Awards, the project led by Tang was elevated to a first-class award, presented at a ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on 8 January 2018 by then-Premier Li Keqiang^※. Tang is the first HKUST scholar to receive this honour since the University's founding^※. In the same year he also received the Ho Leung Ho Lee Foundation Science and Technology Progress Award in Chemistry^※. The Ministry of Science and Technology of China, reporting on the award, singled it out as "a model of scientific exchange and integration between Hong Kong and mainland China^※" — the awarded project's completing institutions spanned three universities: HKUST, South China University of Technology and Zhejiang University^※, with Tang named as lead contributor. CCTV's coverage cited the significance of the discovery in declaring that AIE "opened a brand-new field of basic scientific research that is original and internationally leading^※", rewriting the long-held tenet in photophysics textbooks that "aggregation necessarily quenches emission". The table below traces this trajectory of national honours from second class to first:

A note on sourcing: the specific years of the 2007 second-class award and the Wang Baoren Award are currently confirmed only by the Chinese Chemical Society Fellow page — a single source. The core trio of achievements (the 2001 concept paper, the 2009 academician election, and the 2017 first-class award) are each independently corroborated by HKUST's own primary sources.

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# How does Tang himself explain these "anomalous discoveries"? What is his research philosophy?

Faced with an experimental result that contradicts received experience, most researchers' first instinct is to suspect operator error. Tang's approach was the opposite. In a CCTV interview around the time of his 2018 award^※, he said: "Sometimes doing research means stepping outside the existing frame of thinking. When you observe a phenomenon that differs from established experience, your first reaction should not be to avoid it, but to trace it to its source with great excitement." That sentence is a fair summary of the method that took him from an anomalous report of a "silole solution that did not emit" all the way to a first-class State Natural Science Award.

He also used an analogy to distinguish original research from follow-on research: "Original research is like digging a well — the deeper you go, the more springs you find. If you only follow others without surpassing them, your ideas will sooner or later run dry^※." Colleagues who worked with him describe the team leader from another angle: "Very easy-going and enormously inspiring, yet extremely rigorous in his research and very demanding of us." For twenty-seven years, this combination — staying excited about anomalies while staying exacting about direction — rolled one laboratory accident into a nationally recognised field.

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# What did election to the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2009 mean for a university professor in Hong Kong?

Tang was elected a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in 2009^※, affiliated with the Chemistry Division. CAS membership is among mainland China's highest academic honours, with new members elected every two years; the Chemistry Division produced eight new academicians in 2009^※, Tang among them. For a scholar based in Hong Kong and teaching at HKUST, election meant formal recognition of his research by the mainland Chinese academic community — which is why HKUST's official press releases have since routinely referred to him as "Professor Ben Zhong Tang, Fellow of the Chinese Academy of Sciences". The honour came eight years after the AIE concept was proposed, and still eight years before the first-class State Natural Science Award would finally be confirmed.

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# Stephen Kam-chuen Cheong Professor of Science, Chair Professor in Chemistry and Biomedical Engineering — what positions did Tang actually hold at HKUST?

Tang's titles at HKUST were not static. He was promoted to Chair Professor in 2008^※ and later was appointed to the Stephen Kam-chuen Cheong Professorship of Science^※, a named chair, while also serving as Chair Professor in both the Department of Chemistry and the Department of Biomedical Engineering^※. That dual-department arrangement mirrored the nature of AIE materials themselves, which straddle materials science and biomedical applications — the same compound can serve as a luminescent dye or a bioimaging probe, blurring disciplinary boundaries.

It is worth noting that even after he moved to a mainland Chinese university in 2021, the HKUST School of Engineering website still lists Tang among the Chemistry Department's personnel, with his title given as "Distinguished Visiting Professor of Chemistry" and "Adjunct Professor of Chemistry"^※ — meaning his academic ties to HKUST Chemistry were not severed completely when his formal appointment ended.

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# How big did AIE become after leaving the lab? What do the numbers say about its global impact?

According to the transcript of an official HKUST lecture, during his time at the university Tang's team published around 1,000 academic papers with more than 89,000 citations, and from 2014 to 2017 was consecutively listed as a highly cited researcher in both chemistry and materials science^※. In the same lecture (transcribed on 9 July 2020), Tang said that roughly 12,000 research institutions or departments across 145 countries or regions worldwide were then working on AIE-related research^※, and cited a 2016 Nature article naming AIE as one of four nanomaterials underpinning the "future nano-optical revolution"^※. Both figures are Tang's own statistics as stated in the lecture, relayed via the University's transcript rather than verified directly against the original Nature article.

HKUST's VPRD (Office of the Vice-President for Research and Development) impact-case page provides a separate set of statistics: Tang's team was ranked second in Thomson Reuters' 2015 "hot research fronts" in chemistry and materials science, with citations of the relevant work rising from over 24,000 in 2015 to 40,000 in 2018^※. The Chinese Academy of Sciences, in its reading of the 2017 first-class award, offers yet another independent set: AIE took roughly 17 years from concept to first-class award, with more than 1,500 international teams involved in related research and total citations exceeding 100,000^※. The three sets of figures differ in scope and timing, but all point to the same fact: a two-page paper from an HKUST chemistry laboratory evolved, within two decades, into a disciplinary branch pursued by thousands of international teams.

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# What other roles did Tang hold alongside his HKUST appointment?

Tang's HKUST post did not exist in isolation. From 2013 to 2021 he was simultaneously employed as a jointly appointed professor at South China University of Technology^※, with the two laboratories complementing each other on AIE — which also explains why the completing institutions of the 2017 first-class award spanned HKUST, South China University of Technology and Zhejiang University^※. This pattern — a primary post at HKUST with a joint appointment in mainland China — had operated for nearly eight years before Tang left HKUST, foreshadowing his full-time move to a mainland university in 2021.

That joint appointment bore further fruit in his final year at HKUST: from 27 to 29 January 2021, the launch of the international academic journal Aggregate — co-founded by South China University of Technology, the South China University of Technology Aggregation-Induced Emission Advanced Research Institute in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, and publisher Wiley — took place, with Tang as editor-in-chief^※. The journal's establishment straddled the transition from his final HKUST term to his move to a mainland institution, completing the last piece in "the father of AIE"'s project of distilling an original concept into a full scholarly apparatus of journals and dedicated research institutes.

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# Why did Tang leave HKUST in 2021? Did his relationship with the University end there?

In 2021 Tang left HKUST to become Dean of the School of Science and Engineering and Presidential Chair Professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen^※ — a move that came three years after the first-class State Natural Science Award and twenty-seven years into his HKUST career. This article focuses on his academic life during the 1994–2021 HKUST years; his subsequent institutional career is not explored here. As noted above, he retains the titles of "Distinguished Visiting Professor" and "Adjunct Professor" in the Department of Chemistry at the HKUST School of Engineering^※. Twenty-seven years at HKUST were not wiped clean by a single letter of transfer.

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# Tang and Ching Wan Tang: how do the material-discovery paths of two HKUST Chemistry Chair Professors compare?

In the history of HKUST's Chemistry Department, Tang is not the only scholar to go "from a laboratory accident to international honours." A colleague in the same department, Ching Wan Tang, who invented the double-layer OLED device at Kodak's laboratories in 1987^※, joined HKUST as Chair Professor of Chemistry in 2013^※, overlapping with Ben Zhong Tang's HKUST tenure for a full eight years from 2013 to 2021 — by the time Tang left for The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen in 2021^※, the two had already worked in the same department for years.

The similarity between the two discovery paths is that "the anomaly preceded the theory": Tang chased AIE after a student's report that a "solution did not emit light," while Ching Wan Tang, after hitting a wall in organic solar-cell research, unexpectedly found that the same heterojunction stacked structure could emit light efficiently — and only then turned to OLEDs. The difference lies in the path to industry: OLED was commercialised through Kodak, with the patent portfolio eventually sold to LG Display for US$100 million^※, directly giving rise to a tens-of-billions-of-dollars display industry. AIE, by contrast, has settled more into a set of material-design principles, incubating more than 200 niche materials and nearly 100 patents^※, with applications spread across the long tail of bioimaging, food safety and forensic science — it has not yet spawned a single pillar industry to rival OLED. The honour trajectories also make for a telling comparison: Ching Wan Tang took the international route, first the Wolf Prize in Chemistry (2011)^※ and then the Kyoto Prize (2019)^※; Ben Zhong Tang took the mainland-China national route, with the second-class (2007) and first-class (2017) State Natural Science Awards^※. The point where the two paths converge is a laboratory in the Chemistry Department of HKUST.

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# Further reading

• Notable Professors and Academic Leaders — a college-by-college account of HKUST's representative professors, placing Tang alongside the likes of Kam-Biu Luk and Mingjie Zhang as benchmarks of the Faculty of Science and the School of Engineering.
• Ching Wan Tang — the "Father of OLED", First Chinese Kyoto Prize Laureate, and His Laboratory at HKUST — the other HKUST Chemistry Chair Professor who went from material discovery to glory; read alongside this article for comparison.
• Top Scholars — a survey of the academic backgrounds of successive HKUST Vice-Chancellors and the University's serving academicians.
• Honorary Doctors, Honorary Fellows and Visiting Professors — HKUST's conferral mechanisms and the IAS academician network, useful for comparison with Tang's CAS membership.