Hong-Cai (Joe) Zhou (; born c. 1964) is a Chinese-American chemist and academic. He is the Davidson Professor of Science and Robert A. Welch Chair in Chemistry at Texas A&M University. He is the associate editor of the journal Inorganic Chemistry. Early life and education Zhou gained admission to Beijing Normal University at the age of 16, and took up a position as a lecturer there after receiving his bachelor's degree, teaching introductory chemical engineering classes. In 1996, at the age of 32, he stepped down from his position and chose to go abroad to pursue further studies. Zhou earned a Ph.D. in chemistry at Texas A&M University in 2000, studying under F. Albert Cotton. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University working with Richard H. Holm. Career In 2002, he joined the faculty at Miami University. He won a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2005 and received tenure in 2007. In 2008, Zhou moved to Texas A&M University. In 2014, he was promoted to Davidson Professor of Science and a joint holder of the Davidson Chair in Science. He holds a Welch Chair in Chemistry. Professional work Zhou's research group focuses on metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) with over 350 publications in peer-reviewed journals, including more than 150 in high impact journals such as Nature Chemistry, Nature Communications, Journal of the American Chemical Society, and Angewandte Chemie. Since 2008, the number of citations of his work has increased exponentially reaching annual citations of over 8,643 in 2020 and total citations of around 57,171 with an h-index of 105. Since 2013, he serves as an associate editor of the ACS journal Inorganic Chemistry. Zhou has invented a toolkit for the manipulation of self-assembly of porous materials from a coordination hollow cage to a predesigned, extended network full of hierarchical cavities, bearing various functional groups on the internal surface. These porous structures with hierarchical porosity and programmed sequence of functional groups are in urgent demand for the creation of ordered architectures that can channel the mass and energy flow, which are critical for catalysis, energy harvesting/storage, as well as information processing. Zhou is a trail blazer in synthetic inorganic chemistry of "Pore Engineering", a term coined by Zhou. His research focuses on the design, preparation, and application of framework materials such as hollow coordination cages, metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), and porous polymer networks. He is best known for introducing a variety of