Yang Hai is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UC Santa Barbara, where his group runs at the intersection of enzymology, natural product biosynthesis, and genome mining. He started his chemistry training at Peking University, finishing his B.S. in 2011, and then moved straight to the University of Pennsylvania for his PhD with David Christianson. The five years at Penn were spent largely inside protein X-ray crystallography, working out structure-function relationships of metallohydrolases and getting drawn into the deeper questions of enzyme mechanism, catalysis, and inhibition. He finished his PhD in 2016 and headed to UCLA for a postdoc with Yi Tang, where the focus shifted to fungal natural product biosynthesis. That stretch from 2016 to 2020, funded in part by an LSRF fellowship, is where he started using genome mining to pull new enzymes and metabolic pathways out of fungal genomes. He also spent a summer in 2018 at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole picking up microbiology, which seems to have left a real mark on how he thinks about microbial diversity as a discovery substrate. He started his independent group at UCSB in 2020, and the research program reflects the full arc of that training. The lab integrates chemical and biological tools to find new enzyme functions and grow the toolbox of reactions available for biocatalysis. A lot of the work is genome-mining-driven, going from sequence to function to mechanism, often with crystallography and biochemistry running side by side. Recent publications give a clear picture of the direction, including the discovery and characterization of a pyridoxal 5'-phosphate-dependent Mannich cyclase published with Yi Zou in 2023, a biocatalytic alpha-deuteration method for L-amino acids built on the same PLP enzyme class, and a perspective on the noncanonical terpenome in Nature Chemical Biology. The second arm of the program zooms in on enzymes implicated in human disease and agriculture, again using the structure-function lens he sharpened in the Christianson lab.