Joel Yuen-Zhou

Joel Yuen-Zhou spends his time solving scientific puzzles and developing entirely new ways of driving chemical reactions using quantum effects. The University of California San Diego theoretical chemist says he found his career through a series of happy accidents in childhood. As a child, however, Yuen-Zhou assumed he’d end up working in a job that he didn’t enjoy. His parents, who immigrated from China to Mexico, never graduated from high school. Unaware of the breadth of career opportunities available to their son, they encouraged him to pursue one of the few professions they knew about, such as architecture or dentistry, he says. None of these career options interested Yuen-Zhou in the slightest. Yuen-Zhou’s bleak view of his future changed when he was 14 and competed in a math contest. He liked it so much that he immediately signed himself up for a chemistry competition, the first of many he would