RPI mourns researcher shot, killed at UNC
A judge Tuesday ordered a University of North Carolina graduate student held without bond on charges that he shot and killed his faculty adviser, Zijie Yan, a graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
The judge ordered Tailei Qi, 34, to remain jailed after an interpreter explained to Qi in Mandarin what was happening. She scheduled his next court date for Sept. 18.
Qi faces first-degree murder and other charges in the Monday slaying of Yan inside a science building on the Chapel Hill campus. The attack led to a three-hour lockdown of the campus, a week after students returned for the start of the fall semester. Authorities have not said publicly if they suspect a motive for the attack.
Yan, who leaves behind a 6-year-old daughter, was an associate professor in the Department of Applied Physical Sciences. He had worked for the university since 2019, UNC said in a statement Tuesday.
In a page that has been taken down since the attack, Qi was listed on the school’s website as a graduate student in Yan’s research group and Yan was listed as his adviser.
Yan earned his PH.D. at RPI in 2011. The campus community is mourning his loss.
“He became my best graduate student, publishing 17 papers together on his work,” said his RPI adviser, Doug Chrisey, who is now a professor at Tulane University. “He would knock on my door with incredible experimental results and a huge smile.”
RPI also issued a statement, saying, “Dr. Yan shined a bright light during his time at RPI and our faculty who worked alongside him remember him as bright, curious,
and hardworking.”
Dr. Yunfeng Shi, professor of materials science and engineering at RPI, said he has fond memories of Yan.
“Zijie was a brilliant student, easy-going and always with a big smile, and he had grown into a rising star in his field at UNC. It is such a tragedy for his family, and a huge loss for the materials research community,” he said in a statement.
Yan’s goal was “to transcend the boundary between photonics and materials science by developing new techniques to control light-matter interactions at the nanometer scale,” according to his own statement. RPI said his research was well-regarded, widely cited and will have lasting impact.
At first, while he was at RPI, his papers were rejected because reviewers
said the results were “physically impossible,” Chrisey said, but he proved his work and became a groundbreaking researcher in nanotechnology.
He was more than his work, Chrisey added.
“He was a great cook and would cook for all his roommates, wherever he lived,” Chrisey said. “He was a very sweet man and I am devastated that his life ended needlessly from gun violence involving mental illness . ... Everything can end in a moment and I will miss him so very much.”
When Chrisey last spoke with Yan, he said Yan expressed worry about the student who is now accused of killing him.
“Yan mentioned to me in our last correspondence how one of his graduate students had a mental health problem causing delusions and he hoped he could graduate quickly and remain stable,” Chrisey said. “He let his department know of the situation.”
But, Chrisey said, he thought the issue stemmed from struggling with science research.
“Graduate school in science research is a different kind of hard,” he said. “Students feel great pressure and it often is mired in failed experiments or rejected manuscripts.”
Qi is a graduate student in the department of applied physical sciences studying nanoparticle synthesis and light-matter interaction. He moved to the U.S. from China after earning a bachelor’s degree in physics at Wuhan University, according to the UNC webpage for the Yan Research Group.