Yandong Ma is now working as a professor at School of Physics in Shandong University, China. He received his bachelor degree in physics in 2009 and PhD degree in atomic and molecular physics in 2014 at Shandong University. During the PhD work period, he made significant contributions to the fundamental research of a broad range of 2D materials. The works resulted in a number of publications in high impact journals. In 2014, he joined Prof. Thomas Heine’s group at Jacob University where he extended his research into topological insulators. Great success has been made through the close collaborations with the internationally leading scientists. He proposed a novel family of 2D TI materials and proposed many innovative ideas in designing various new 2D structures. These works have laid the foundations for the design of 2D TIs for building future devices. After moving to Universität Leipzig, Prof. Ma was involved in another project on 2D semiconducting materials and also made significant contributions, producing several important results. So far his papers have been cited for over 2600 citations in a short period of time (including six ESI highly cited papers), which gains him, at the age of 31, an h-index of 24.