About Yongjiang Laboratory

Yongjiang Laboratory

Yongjiang Laboratory, known in English as Y-LAB, is a non-profit research and innovation institution in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, on China's eastern seaboard. Established in 2021 with robust and sustained government backing, it is dedicated to new materials science and technology, advancing research from fundamental science through development to commercialisation. It works across advanced structural materials, advanced functional materials, transformative materials and advanced manufacturing, and its permanent site of 127 acres was planned to support approximately 3,000 staff. The laboratory describes its task as bridging fundamental science and transformative technology in close collaboration with industry.

Establishment and mission

Y-LAB was established in 2021 as a non-profit research and innovation centre in Ningbo. Its stated ambition is to advance the frontiers of new materials science and deliver value across all stages of research, development and commercialisation, powering innovation to accelerate the transfer of cutting-edge technologies from the laboratory to the marketplace. Guided by both scientific frontiers and real-world needs, the laboratory pursues what it calls a dual-drive innovation strategy: conducting fundamental research at the forefront of science and technology while addressing the pressing demands of industrial development. Its work focuses on advanced materials and related fields, and on major scientific challenges and critical core technologies within them. Recruitment material describes it as one of China's most heavily capitalised new research and development institutions.

Campus and scale

The laboratory's permanent site covers 127 acres and was designed as a modern, purpose-built place capable of supporting approximately 3,000 staff, with completion and use planned by 2024. Ningbo itself is presented by the laboratory as a dynamic coastal city with excellent international connectivity, approximately two hours from Shanghai. Alongside the main campus, individual centres operate substantial facilities of their own: the flagship Center for Advanced Smart Materials, for example, is a purpose-built 7,000-square-metre research facility integrating discovery science, advanced characterisation and technology transfer under one roof.

Research areas: structural and functional materials

Y-LAB organises its research under four headings. Advanced structural materials covers polymers and composites and advanced alloys. Advanced functional materials covers green chemical and chemistry materials, electronic information materials and devices, biomedical materials, and new energy materials. These areas are pursued by a constellation of named research centres and teams, including a Specialty Polymers Research Center, a Functional Organic Materials Research Center, an Advanced Structural Ceramics Research Center, an Advanced Display and Sensing Research Center, an Advanced Electrical Machine Drive Research Center, a Precision Integrated Photonics Research Center, a centre for the controllable preparation and application of silica, a Nanocarbon New Energy Materials Research Center, a Thermal Field Materials Innovation Center, a 3D Manufacturing Innovation Center, and a Metal-Hydrogen Chemistry and Energy Catalysis Research Center.

Transformative materials and advanced manufacturing

The laboratory's third research heading, transformative materials, addresses materials for extreme environments and other step-change material concepts, while the fourth, advanced manufacturing, covers advanced manufacturing technologies and devices. The laboratory frames all four areas as a single pipeline: it seeks sustainable solutions to high-priority problems faced by industry and society in materials science and technology development, and applies its research results to develop marketable innovation in cooperation with industrial partners. This combination of frontier materials discovery with manufacturing and commercialisation work distinguishes Y-LAB among China's new provincial laboratories.

Center for Advanced Smart Materials

The Center for Advanced Smart Materials (CASM) is the laboratory's flagship centre for materials that sense and respond to external stimuli such as force, electricity, magnetism, heat, sound and light. Preparation for the centre began in March 2025; its launching ceremony was held at the laboratory's innovation park on 19 January 2026, after the team had assembled its core members and built its experimental platforms, officially entering what the laboratory called a stage of full-speed development. CASM's core goal is to discover new physical effects in intelligent materials and to develop "super smart materials" with ultra-high performance or entirely new functions through interdisciplinary innovation across materials, physics, engineering and artificial intelligence. The laboratory expects such materials to provide key support for biomedical applications, autonomous driving, robotics, drones and artificial tactile sensing.

Leadership of the smart materials centre

CASM is directed by Ren Xiaobing, a senior researcher at Yongjiang Laboratory who has long worked on ferroic intelligent materials and holds significant influence in the international academic community. Recruitment material issued by the centre credits Ren, an internationally recognised pioneer in ferroic smart materials, with more than 300 publications and more than 30,000 citations, and with establishing global leadership in strain-glass physics and high-performance piezoelectrics. Announcing the centre's launch, Yongjiang Laboratory director Cui Ping described its establishment as an important forward-looking strategic layout responding to development trends in materials science, noting that materials form the foundation for the advancement of manufacturing and high-end equipment, and that smart materials are at a critical stage in the transition from scientific exploration to engineering application.

Research record: strain glass and super piezoelectrics

The centre presents a record of landmark results arising from more than 30 years of sustained fundamental research by Ren's group. They include work published in Nature in 2024 on "super-flexible yet super-strong" strain-glass metals, described as a new paradigm in metallic materials, and research reported in Science in 2026 on super piezoelectric ceramics far exceeding conventional performance limits — characterised by the laboratory as breaking a 70-year bottleneck with a 10-to-30-fold performance leap. Strain-glass alloys built on the foundational concept proposed by Ren and characterised by his group were developed by aerospace partners and successfully deployed in China's Chang'e-5 and Chang'e-6 lunar missions. The centre recruits researchers across shape-memory and ferroelastic alloys, piezoelectric and ferroelectric materials, and magnetostrictive and ferromagnetic materials.

Shared research platforms

All of the laboratory's research platforms are open to the broader community, providing shared access to research infrastructure, scientific resources and technical services. The Micro-Nano Device Fabrication Center is an open-access research, development and prototyping facility focused on heterogeneous integration technologies, accelerating the transition from ideas to manufacturable technologies in microelectronics, photonics and advanced packaging. The Materials Analysis and Testing Center offers integrated analytical and characterisation services for advanced materials and devices, including chemical composition analysis, physical property measurement, microstructural and surface characterisation, reliability evaluation and failure analysis. The Imaging and Characterization of Advanced Materials Center is an electron microscopy facility equipped with nearly ten state-of-the-art instruments, including the Iliad Ultra and the Spectra 300 with Lorentz aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscopy capability, spanning length scales from individual atoms to complex nanoscale architectures. Through cutting-edge instrumentation, expert technical support and open access to the scientific community, that centre supports discoveries in materials science, energy technologies, electronic information materials and advanced manufacturing, and contributes to the development of future research talent. The laboratory presents the three shared platforms — fabrication, analysis and testing, and imaging and characterisation — as open infrastructure for the wider research community, not only for its own teams, so that researchers, start-ups and industrial partners can move from innovative ideas to manufacturable technologies and real-world applications in fields such as microelectronics, photonics and advanced packaging.

Innovation and incubation ecosystem

Beyond its laboratories, Y-LAB operates a four-pillar innovation and incubation ecosystem — venture capital funds, incubators, shared factories and an innovation academy — intended to accelerate the translation of scientific discoveries and technological innovations from the laboratory to real-world applications and market deployment. The laboratory states that it values and champions its staff, and recruits internationally across its research teams, platforms and departments, including postdoctoral fellows and graduates. Recent publicised results from across the laboratory include work on semiconducting and magnetic lanthanide MXenes published in Nature, and an artificial-intelligence-driven "self-driving" chemistry laboratory combining AI with flow chemistry for molecular discovery — evidence of the breadth of the materials programme the Ningbo institution has assembled since 2021.