Q&A with Professor Shuming Nie

Two of your articles have more than 10,000 citations each. Written in 1997 and 1998, today, they continue to receive hundreds of citations per year. How do you create work that remains so relevant in a field that changes so quickly?

Clearly, these are very rare events that cannot be logically analyzed or predicted. The best words for this phenomenon are “serendipity” or “luck happening to a prepared mind.”  When we published these two papers in 1997 and 1998, we knew that the results were very exciting; but we never imagined that each of these papers would be cited over 10,000 times.

Looking back, it is really luck, boldness and curiosity that led us to remove population averaging in surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) of plasmonic nanoparticles, which then allowed us to report an intrinsic enhancement effect 100 million times higher than the population-averaged values.

This new finding surprised us, shocked the scientific community and made a long-lasting impact on subsequent works. Similarly, it is this kind of daring spirit that motivated us to link or conjugate semiconductor quantum dots to biological molecules, which quickly found broad applications in biomedical imaging and diagnostics.

These papers continue to be cited in the scientific literature because each of them defined a new area at the interface of science, engineering and medicine, and these topics continue to be popular in nanotechnology and nanomedicine.

What drew you to nanomedicine initially?

My academic training was primarily in quantum calculation, optical spectroscopy and electrocatalytic chemistry, due to my graduate work under Professor Richard Van Duyne at Northwestern University and my postdoctoral training with Professor Richard Zare at Stanford University. My first academic appointment was in the chemistry department at Indiana University.

I’ve had a strong interest in using ultra-fast spectroscopy to study fundamental processes such as protein folding and electron transfer in biochemistry; but the biggest push toward nanomedicine was my decision in 2002 to join the faculty of biomedical engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University. I immediately enjoyed the collegial and collaborative environment in biomedical engineering, which allowed my research to flourish in combining engineering and medicine, especially in cancer nanomedicine and image-guided surgery.

Your journey has taken you all over the world. What drew you to Illinois?

The big draws are Illinois’ reputation and academic excellence, new opportunities in bioengineering and biocomputing, as well as the environment.

I have worked at several academic institutions, and I would characterize Illinois as scholarly, collaborative and collegial. This spirit is very important because it encourages me to think about original problems, explore new frontiers and work on team projects that I cannot do alone.

Of your hundreds of papers, what are some of your favorites or most memorable?

The most memorable paper is clearly our work on single-molecule SERS published in 1997, which was so astonishing that my student Steve Emory and I could not believe it ourselves. We spent a full six months trying to find out if the results were caused by artifacts, but at the end, we could not show that it was wrong, so we submitted it for publication.

The second memorable paper is our 1998 quantum dot work with my student Warren Chan that was published together with a similar paper from Paul Alivisatos’ group (back-to-back in the same issue of Science). These two papers validated each other instantaneously because the results were so similar. The only thing was that Alivisatos’ group got to be the first, and our paper got to be the second. It turned out that Alivisatos submitted his work to Science a few days earlier than us.  

Interestingly, Paul Alivisatos is currently president of the University of Chicago, and Warren Chan is the dean of engineering at Nanyang Technological University-Singapore.  Dr. Chan earned his B.S. in chemistry at Illinois in 1996. He visited campus and spoke at the Bioengineering Department’s 20th anniversary symposium in April 2025.

 

How does it feel to have mentored so many important figures?

Yes, many of my students and postdocs have gone on to great success in academia and in the biotech and pharmaceutical world in the United States and in many other countries. I derive even greater happiness from their success and their impact than from my purely academic work. Of course, their successes are primarily due to their talents and hard work; but it is still a good feeling that my guidance during their early careers might have played a role.  

What guides your decision making when choosing a research topic?

Well, I have to be interested in the topic, and I need to find an entry point so I can contribute. The topic needs to be intellectually exciting or practically important (or both) and, if it is for the long term, it needs to be sustainable with funding.

Who is another researcher you admire and why?

There are many great scholars and smart people who I admire, people who have made a major impact in society.  I am most deeply influenced by my doctoral advisor Richard Van Duyne and my postdoctoral advisor Richard Zare. Van Duyne is a methodical and precise scholar, one of the most organized and insightful people that I have seen. Unfortunately, he passed away a few years ago (I wrote a memorial article in his honor, published in the academic journal ACS Nano). Zare is most enthusiastic and fun loving. He is a household name on the campus of Stanford University. It is worth noting that both of them have long reached the milestone of 100,000 citations, and I am glad that I have finally joined them.

Are there some "secrets" to creating so much high-quality research?

There are no secrets, but there are certain traits and habits that can help. Start with first principles, think through things carefully and ask honest and insightful questions. High-impact work starts with great ideas, careful planning and skillful execution, but that is not enough. It needs to be written and presented well to reach a broad readership.

What would your advice be to a young researcher in the field, just starting out?

My advice is to learn the fundamentals, develop a deep understanding of key concepts, find a research topic that you are truly interested in and be bold and daring. Prepare to encounter difficulties and even failure because nothing worthwhile is easy.

 

Engineering Affiliations
Shuming Nie is a Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering at The Grainger College of Engineering and a professor of bioengineering, chemistry, materials science and engineering and electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.