Today at Brown

Lai-Sheng Wang walks comfortably in two scientific worlds.

He earned his Ph.D. in physical chemistry, yet since 2002 he has taught university-level physics. Now, he comes to Brown to join the Department of Chemistry.

Asked whether he’s a chemist or a physicist, Wang replied that he’s a physical chemist, but the distinction means little to him and the objects he studies. “You’re dealing with molecules and atoms,” he pointed out. “They don’t know chemistry from physics.”

Wang’s research occurs at the nanoscale, the subatomic level of nature where physical laws and chemistry are not as they appear in the larger world. Gold, for example, that most inert of elements, is a creature of a different stripe when viewed at the nanoscale, Wang explains. “Everything changes,” he said.

Wang wants to understand those changes, with gold and with other elements, such as boron, which he described as having “great potential for nanoclusters.” As a physicist at Washington State University, Wang and his team learned that gold formed a cage-like shape from about 16 atoms. That discovery landed him in the New York Times. Ratchet up the number to 20 atoms, his team and others have learned, and the gold nanocluster morphs into a pyramid.

“To really understand this is a lot of fun,” he said.

Beyond the joy of discovery, Wang would like to better understand why and how metal nanostructures are created and to probe how such synthetic clusters may be used, whether as new chemical catalysts or as novel building blocks for cluster-assembled nanomaterials.

“Our goal is, can we discover specific structures that we can then make?” he said.

The 48-year-old from China moves to Providence from Washington State University, where he was a professor of physics. He hopes to have about 10 graduate students and visiting scholars staffing three rooms of laboratories at Brown. The research will focus on metal nanoclusters, Wang said. This fall, he will shuttle between his ongoing work at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Brown and will settle in more permanently in the spring.

His wife, Li-Qiong Wang, will also join the Department of Chemistry in January. The couple has two daughters — Selina, who will attend Barrington High School, and Roanna, who enrolls at Dartmouth College this fall.

Asked about why he decided to move across the country, Wang revealed his family’s taste for new adventures and the couple’s enthusiasm for working with new colleagues.

“Physically, we’ve never lived on the East Coast,” he said. “We felt culturally this would be enriching.”