Yi-Lin was born in Taipei and received his B.S. in Chemistry from National Taiwan University (2005) under the tutelage of Professor Tien-Yau Luh. After the military service, he moved to Switzerland to pursue his M.Sc. (2008) and Ph.D. (2012) degrees at ETH Zürich with Professor François Diederich. At ETH, he was involved in a wide range of physical organic projects ranging from the mechanistic investigation of click-type syntheses to photo-switchable systems for cholesteric liquid crystal induction. His graduate work was recognized by the Excellence Scholarship of ETH Zurich, Novartis M.Sc. Fellowship, and the Scholarship Fund of the Swiss Chemical Industry.

Following his Ph.D., he was awarded the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) Fellowship to start his postdoctoral research (2012) in the group of Professor Michael Wasielewski at Northwestern University, where he was subsequently promoted as the Research Assistant Professor (2014) and Research Associate Professor (2017) in Chemistry. At Northwestern, he took the synthetic and spectroscopic approaches simultaneously to interrogate the interplay between the self-assembly nanostructures and excited-state electron/spin/energy dynamics of biology- and photovoltaics-relevant materials.

Yi-Lin took the post of Lecturer in Materials Chemistry at Cardiff University in January 2019.