IEEE Raises MIE’s Xian Du to the Status of Senior Membership

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The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has selected Xian Du, an assistant professor in the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department who is also affiliated with the UMass Amherst Institute for Applied Life Sciences (IALS) Center for Personalized Health Monitoring, as a senior member in the IEEE. Du’s much-acclaimed research focuses on the scale-up of flexible electronics printing processes from lab to industry using AI-assisted, high-precision, in-line inspection techniques.

The prestigious Senior Membership honor is limited to those highly accomplished IEEE members “who have made significant contributions to the profession.” Only 10 percent of IEEE’s members hold this grade, which requires extensive experience and reflects professional maturity and documented achievements of significance.

Among the many benefits of IEEE Senior Membership are a letter of commendation on the achievement of senior member grade, the professional recognition of peers for technical and professional excellence, and an engraved plaque that, as the IEEE says, “you can proudly display to colleagues, clients, and employers.”

Senior members are also eligible to hold executive IEEE volunteer positions, to serve as references for other applicants for Senior Membership, and to serve on the panel that reviews senior member applications.

Du received his Ph.D. degree in the program of Innovation of Manufacturing Systems and Technology from the Singapore-Massachusetts Institute of Technology Alliance, and he earned his M.S. in Mechatronics Engineering from Shanghai Jiaotong University in China and his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Tianjin University in China.

Du is also a recipient of a 2020 National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award. This NSF grant supports his research that targets improvements in roll-to-roll soft lithography by establishing a learning-based modeling method that guides the design and control of continuous microcontact printing processes and investigates continuous pattern formation mechanisms.

As Du explained about the overall concentration of his Intelligent Sensing Lab, “My research focuses on the scale-up of roll-to-roll manufacturing processes from lab to industry which requires high-precision, in-line, inspection and pattern-recognition technologies for quality control. Micro-scale and nano-scale inspections in a large area with high throughput can facilitate metrology and inspection during manufacturing at low costs and high speeds.”

Du added that “My techniques have also been developed for automatic, accurate, and robust computation tools in medical devices for quantitative assessment of clinical images.”

When asked why he chose to come to UMass Amherst, Du replied that “UMass has the best roll-to-roll printing facility for me to perform scale-up research. MIE and IALS offer me a strong research community for medical imaging research. And Amherst has a friendly community for my family life.” (March 2023)