In the fall of 2015, Peidong Yang, professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, received a phone call from the MacArthur Foundation. The caller asked if Yang was alone. Having just finished his lunch, Yang hurried to his office. The caller identified himself as the director of the Foundation, and told Yang of his selection for a MacArthur fellowship. Peidong Yang. Image courtesy of Peidong Yang. The grant recognized Yang’s pioneering work in developing semiconductor nanowires, which are small filaments with tunable optical and physical properties. By the time of the MacArthur grant, Yang, who was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2016, had already made advances in nanowire photonics, including nanoscale lasers. Shortly thereafter, he and his group showed how nanowires could contribute to a zero-carbon energy future by mimicking one of biology’s basic processes: photosynthesis. Yang was born in 1971 in Suzhou, China, a city called “the Venice of the East” because of its many canals. The child of a doctor and a teacher, Yang and his two older siblings were raised in a culture that placed high value on education. In a secondary education system that Yang describes as examination-heavy, he excelled in chemistry and mathematics. Praised by his teachers for his scores, Yang chose chemistry as a major when, in 1988, he entered the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, 200 miles from Suzhou. As a second-year undergraduate, Yang joined the laboratory of Yitai Qian, who studied high-temperature superconductors. “I was fascinated with the solid-state materials chemistry of these high-T superconductors,” Yang says. “You can mix compounds and make new crystals and new compositions and get a higher transition temperature for the superconductor state.” His years in Qian’s laboratory set the course for Yang’s own research program in solid-state …