Cuifeng Ying

Cuifeng Ying serves as a Senior Lecturer in Electrical Engineering within the Department of Engineering at Nottingham Trent University's School of Science and Technology. She leads research in the Advanced Optics and Photonics Group (AOP Lab), specializing in cutting-edge nanopore and plasmonic technologies for single-molecule analysis.

Her academic foundation includes:

• Ph.D. in Physics from Nankai University (2013), developing photonic crystals and plasmonic nanocavities for biosensing
• Postdoctoral research at Nankai University's Centre for Nanoscale Science and Technology on single-molecule nanopore sensing
• Postdoctoral position with Prof. Michael Mayer at the Adolphe Merkle Institute, University of Fribourg

Dr. Ying's research pioneers solid-state nanopore fabrication and plasmonic nanotweezers for real-time monitoring of unmodified protein dynamics. Her work enables fingerprinting of individual proteins through innovative surface functionalization methods and data analysis algorithms, with direct applications in disease mechanism studies and biosensor development. She bridges nanotechnology, biophysics, and electrical engineering to solve fundamental challenges in molecular characterization.

Analysis of her 15 most recent publications reveals consistent focus on advancing nanopore technology (60% of works) and plasmonic biosensing (40%), with growing integration of machine learning for data analysis. Her research spans fundamental nanofluidics to applied biomedical diagnostics, evidenced by collaborations with institutions in Switzerland, Australia, and India.

Her scientific recognition includes:

• Academy of Medical Sciences Springboard Fellowship (2025) for "Dynamic Profiling of Individual, Unmodified Intrinsically Disordered Proteins using Optical Nanotweezers"

As Principal Investigator, Dr. Ying secured the £125k AMS Springboard Award (2025-2027) and £12k Royal Society International Exchanges grant (2025-2027) with Nagaoka University of Technology. She co-leads the UKIERI-SPARC India collaboration (£60k, 2024-2025) and contributes to major projects including the Royal Society Wolfson Fellowship (£250k) and UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship extension (£567k). Within the AOP Lab, she directs the bio-photonics stream developing ultrasensitive sensors capable of single-protein detection, with recent breakthroughs in optical nanotweezers for protein disassembly kinetics.