From May 20 to 21, 2023, Prof. Fang Yu attended the Edinburgh Instruments 2023 Latest Technologies and Applications Conference of Molecular Spectroscopy in Zhuhai, Guangdong, and was awarded the 50th Anniversary Friendship Award by Edinburgh Instruments.

He was invited to give a keynote speech titled Film-based Fluorescent Sensors - From Sensing Materials to Hardware Structures at the opening ceremony of the conference.

The Award was also presented to Prof. Li Yi of the Institute of Physical and Chemical Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Prof. Chen Jian of the School of Electronic Science and Engineering of Nanjing University.

Edinburgh Instruments is a company specializing in the development of spectroscopy, particularly fluorescence spectroscopy techniques and instruments, and is reputed worldwide. As early as during his study in the UK, Fang Yu started using Edinburgh Instruments’ single photon counting fluorescence spectrometer, which was codenamed 199 and was almost the earliest in the world, at the Lancaster University Polymer Center and the Synchrotron Radiation Facility (SRF) at Daresbury.

For decades, Fang Yu has been conducting fundamental and applied research on the photophysics of organic molecules and organic molecular systems using various static and time-resolved fluorescence techniques as the main methods, and the film-based fluorescent sensor technology he developed was selected as one of the 2022 top ten emerging technologies in chemistry by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC).