Principle Investigator

Principle Investigator-(Curriculum Vitae, Google Scholar)

Fengnian Xia is a solid-state device engineer. He received the B.E. degree with highest honor in electronics engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 1998 and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA in 2001 and 2005, respectively. He was employed at IBM Thomas J. Watson research center in Yorktown Heights, NY, USA as postdoc, engineer, and research staff from 2005 to 2013. He started at Yale University as an assistant professor in September 2013. Currently he is the Barton L. Weller associate professor in engineering and science in Department of Electrical Engineering. His current research focuses on nanophotonics and nanoelectronics using both emerging and traditional semiconductor materials. He is particularly interested in the light-matter interaction and quantum transport in the low-dimensional materials. He also actively develops electronic and photonic devices for applications in computing, flexible electronics, imaging, optical communications, and energy harvesting.

Professor Xia is on the editorial board of Nano Research (Springer and Tsinghua University Press), Advanced Optical Materials (Wiley), 2D Materials (IOP Science), and npj 2D Materials and Applications (Nature Partner Journal). He was a primary guest editor of IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics, and he is currently an associate editor of Science Advances (AAAS).

Professor Xia’s honors include the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2019), National Science Foundation CAREER award (2016), the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award (2015), the IBM Pat Goldberg Memorial Best Paper Award (2014), the TR35 Award, MIT Technology Review’s Top Young Innovators under 35 (2011), the IBM Corporate Award, that corporation’s highest technical honor (2012), and the designation of the Weller Professorship in Engineering and Science by Yale President in October 2015. He was elected Fellow of Optica in 2022 and has also been recognized as a Highly Cited Researcher by Clarivate Analytics since 2017.