Guangzhao Mao. Professor Guangzhao Mao is an American chemical engineer and an academic. She is professor and Head of the School of Engineering at the University of Edinburgh. From 2020 to 2024 she served as the Head of the School of Chemical Engineering at the University of New South Wales. She has held positions as chief investigator at the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Carbon Science and Innovation, the ARC Research Hub for Resilient Intelligent Infrastructure Systems, and the ARC Research Hub for Connected Sensors for Health.

Mao is most known for her work on nanotechnology, primarily focusing on targeted drug delivery and electrochemistry for sensors.

Education
Mao completed her BSc in chemistry from Nanjing University in 1988 and obtained her PhD in chemical engineering from the University of Minnesota in 1994. She then completed her postdoctoral fellowship at the same institution in 1995.

Career
Mao began her academic career in 1995 by joining Wayne State University as an assistant professor, promoted to full professor, and served until 2020. Since 2020, she has been serving as a professor at the school of chemical engineering at the University of New South Wales.

Mao served as the director of the material science graduate program at Wayne State University from 2011 to 2015 and as the Chair of the Chemical Engineering and Material Science Department at Wayne State University from 2015 to 2020. From 2020 to 2024, she held the position of the Head of the School of Chemical Engineering at the University of New South Wales. She joined the University of Edinburgh as Head of the School of Engineering in September 2024.

Mao has been the chief investigator of the ARC Research Hub for Connected Sensors for Health and the ARC Research Hub for Resilient Intelligent Infrastructure Systems, and as of 2023, she has also been serving as the chief investigator of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Carbon Science and Innovation.

Research
Mao has authored numerous publications spanning the areas of nanomanufacturing, nanofabrication, and nanochemistry, including articles in peer-reviewed journals.

Targeted drug delivery
Centered on localized gene delivery, Mao's research proposed biodegradable polymer coatings for sequential DNA release from implantable devices. This was built on her PhD research on the multilayer films. In 2016, she and her team pioneered the idea of using retrograde transport proteins to specifically deliver drugs for treating respiratory issues linked to spinal cord injury. In related research, she collaborated with Harry Goshgarian and Abdulghani Sankari to advance nanotherapeutics by integrating retrograde transport proteins, adenosine receptor antagonists, and nanoparticle carriers. Furthermore, she proposed a new technique for delivering drugs specifically to the central nervous system (CNS) using nanoparticles that are chemically attached to neural tract tracer proteins and can be transported along specific neural pathways, allowing them to bypass the blood–brain barrier and target the CNS directly. Mao used human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) for assessing nanotoxicology, specifically, the effect of nanoparticle size on the viability, pluripotency, neuronal differentiation, and DNA methylation of hESCs. Her work revealed a type of gold nanoparticles to be highly toxic and demonstrated the potential of hESCs in predicting nanotoxicity.

Nanotechnology and nanosensor manufacturing
Mao's other nanotechnology research has focused on seed-mediated crystallization for nanosensor scale up. Her early research examined the potential of designing nucleation seeds to induce shape change in molecular crystals. In her investigation of the impact of seed size and surface chemistry, her study illustrated the capability of nanoparticles to effectively change the ordering pattern of molecular crystals nucleated on the nanoparticle. Moreover, she examined the use of electrochemistry to deposit both the nanoparticle seeds and the molecular crystals on the seed to form a hybrid nanostructure. In 2020, her research group introduced a method for manufacturing nanowire sensors by electrochemically depositing charge-transfer salt nanowire crystals on sensor substrates, demonstrating their gas sensing capabilities for detecting ammonia concentrations in the range of 1–100 ppm through electrical impedance measurements. In 2023, Mao demonstrated the potential of electrochemistry for precise deposition and scale up of nanosensors. She applied atomic force microscopy and surface forces measurement techniques for the study of colloidal and biomolecular interfaces including liposomes, DNA nanoparticles, and viral particles.

Awards and honors
1997 – Faculty Career Award, National Science Foundation
2002 – Fulbright Senior Scholar
2022 – Fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers

Selected articles
Mao, G., Tsao, Y., Tirrell, M., Davis, H. T., Hessel, V., & Ringsdorf, H. (1993). Self-assembly of photopolymerizable bolaform amphiphile mono-and multilayers. Langmuir, 9(12), 3461–3470.
D Chen, R Wang, I Arachchige, G Mao, SL Brock (2004), Particle− Rod Hybrids: Growth of Arachidic Acid Molecular Rods from Capped Cadmium Selenide Nanoparticles, Journal of the American Chemical Society 126 (50), 16290–16291.
MC Senut, Y Zhang, F Liu, A Sen, DM Ruden, G Mao (2016), Size‐dependent toxicity of gold nanoparticles on human embryonic stem cells and their neural derivatives, Small 12 (5), 631–646.
Y Zhang, JB Walker, Z Minic, F Liu, H Goshgarian, G Mao (2016), Transporter protein and drug-conjugated gold nanoparticles capable of bypassing the blood-brain barrier, Scientific reports 6 (1), 1–8.
MM Hassan, M Hettiarachchi, M Kilani, X Gao, A Sankari, C Boyer, G Mao (2021), Sustained A1 adenosine receptor antagonist drug release from nanoparticles functionalized by a neural tracing protein, ACS Chemical Neuroscience 12 (23), 4438–4448.
M Kilani, M Ahmed, M Mayyas, Y Wang, K Kalantar‐Zadeh, G Mao (2023), Toward Precision Deposition of Conductive Charge‐Transfer Complex Crystals Using Nanoelectrochemistry, Small Methods 7 (4), 2201198.

References

Chemical engineers
Nanjing University alumni
University of Minnesota alumni
Faculties of the University of New South Wales
American chemical engineers
Living people
Year of birth missing (living people)
Academics of the University of Edinburgh
Fellows of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers