A note in Zijie Yan's oldest daughter's penmanship declaring "Zijie is my dad!" greeted visitors at his office door.
Monika Kataria, a postdoctoral research associate who worked in Yan's research group, said Yan would sometimes bring his two young daughters to the lab. She said his love for his daughters was obvious by the way he spoke to them.
UNC senior Bergen Murray, who was in Yan's research group since her first year at the University, said she could often hear his children giggling in the background of their weekly Zoom meeting.
"Because of how gentle he seemed, I could tell that he was probably a really good dad," she said.
Murray said she joined Yan's research group with little experience, but he was always "very, very patient" with her.
Kataria and Murray are two of the many students and researchers Yan mentored before his death on Aug. 28. Tailei Qi, a graduate student who worked with Yan, was charged with first-degree murder for his death.
Originally from China, Yan graduated from Huazhong University of Science and Technology before moving to the United States to pursue a doctoral degree, which he earned from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2011. He completed his postdoctoral studies at the University of Chicago in 2015 and became an assistant professor at Clarkson University. In 2019, he joined the UNC Department of Applied Physical Sciences.
Yan recently achieved academic tenure at UNC as an associate professor, and he led a research lab of postdoctoral researchers and graduate and undergraduate students.
"He just wanted to educate people, to teach people and mentor people," Murray said.
