He was a post-doctoral fellow with Galen D. Stucky at University of California, Santa Barbara from 1997 to 1999, until being hired as an assistant professor in chemistry at UC Berkeley.
The approach was to introduce single-crystalline oxide nanowires into a high-Tc superconductor, to make a composite to create stable nanoscopic linear tracks, and to increase the critical current density by "pinning" the flux lines.
[11] In the same year, his team demonstrated the first functional p-, n-, and ambipolar ionic nanofluidic circuitry, where ion transport could be electrically gated like traditional field-effect transistors for electrons, a work with implications for seawater desalination and salinity gradient energy harvesting.
[22] Yang and his colleague Arun Majumdar were the first to demonstrate experimentally that silicon nanowires exhibit size-dependent thermal conductivities, validating this early prediction.
[29] In 2024, he revised the nanowire biophotochemical system design, enabling bias-free CO2 fixation with a high current density under red light irradiation.
[34][35] Yang co-founded Alphabet Energy with Matthew L. Scullin[36] and was also a founding member of the scientific advisory board at Nanosys, a nanomaterials company whose nanowire technologies were acquired by OneD Battery Sciences in 2013.
[37] OneD Materials manufactures silicon nanowires at scale for battery makers, utilizing a scaled-up CVD system to produce nanowire-based composites with 340 MWh anode capacity.