Principal Investigator

Principal Investigator-(Curriculum Vitae, Google Scholar)

Fengnian Xia is a solid-state device engineer specializing in nanoelectronics and nanophotonics. He received his B.E. degree with highest honors in electronics engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 1998, followed by M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 2001 and 2005, respectively. From 2005 to 2013, he worked at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, where he held roles as a postdoctoral researcher, engineer, and research staff member. In September 2013, he joined Yale University as an assistant professor and currently holds the Tso-Ping Ma Professorship in Electrical and Computer Engineering.

His research focuses on nanophotonics and nanoelectronics, leveraging both emerging and classic semiconductor materials. He is particularly interested in light–matter interactions and quantum transport in low-dimensional systems. In addition, he develops advanced electronic and photonic devices for applications in intelligent sensing, imaging, computing, optical communications, and energy harvesting.

Professor Xia serves on the editorial boards of Advanced Optical Materials (Wiley), 2D Materials (IOP Science), and npj 2D Materials and Applications (Nature Partner Journals). He has served as a lead guest editor for the IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics and is currently an associate editor of Science Advances (AAAS).

Professor Xia’s honors include the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, the IBM Pat Goldberg Memorial Best Paper Award, the TR35 Award recognizing MIT Technology Review’s top young innovators under 35, the IBM Corporate Award, the corporation’s highest technical honor, and the Weller Professorship in Engineering and Science conferred by Yale University in 2015. He is a Fellow of Optica and the American Physical Society (APS) and has been recognized as a Highly Cited Researcher by Clarivate Analytics since 2017.