Chiyoung Ahn was born and raised in Seoul, South Korea. He earned his B.S. in Pharmacy with honors from Seoul National University (SNU), where he also obtained his pharmacist license. In 2013, he completed his M.S. under the supervision of Prof.Young-Ger Suh at SNU, focusing on the total synthesis of the bioactive natural product nardostachysin via a Tsuji–Trost allylic cyclization.

Following his master’s degree, Chiyoung worked for three and a half years as a medicinal chemist on the drug discovery team at Dong-A ST in Korea, contributing tothe development of GPR40 and GPR119 agonists. He then pursued his Ph.D. in chemistry in Prof. M. Christina White’s group at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (UIUC), where he developed a chemoselective manganese-catalyzed remote C(sp³)–H oxidation system and a neural network model to predict oxidation sites in complex substrates.

After earning his Ph.D. in 2024, Chiyoung joined Gould group at UC Berkeley as its first member. His research focuses on electrochemical radical generation from common functional groups to streamline the synthesis of pharmaceutically relevant molecules, alongside other projects in synthetic methodology using magnetic energy inputs.