Qiangfei Xia Named 2026-2027 Samuel F. Conti Faculty Fellow

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The Office of Research and Engagement has announced that three researchers have been named 2026-27 Samuel F. Conti Faculty Fellowship Awardees. One of those researchers is Qiangfei Xia, Dev and Linda Gupta Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

The Conti Fellowship recognizes the exceptional quality and significance of a faculty member’s accomplishments in research and creative endeavors at UMass Amherst, as well as their potential for sustained excellence, and the expected impact and timeliness of the project they propose to pursue during the fellowship.

More information on the program and the current and former Conti Fellows is available on the Research and Engagement website.

Artificial intelligence is now widely used in everyday technologies, but the hardware running these programs hasn’t evolved as quickly as the software. Modern AI systems still rely on outdated computing designs that separate memory and processing, causing inefficiencies in speed and energy use. As AI demands grow, companies compensate by building large, energy-intensive data centers, which increases power consumption and raises environmental and societal concerns. Qiangfei Xia’s research aims to address power consumption in AI hardware and his proposed research contributions will benefit our computationally intense future.

With the Conti fellowship, the Dev and Linda Gupta Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering plans to develop a low power and uniform memristive device to further reduce energy consumption in next generation AI hardware. Xia will first make the behavior of devices more consistent by improving their physical structure, followed by fine electrical tuning to control speed of response. His research will lay a foundation for future generations of energy-efficient, brain-inspired computing hardware. 

References wrote that “Professor Xia is an internationally renowned leader in the development of novel semiconductor devices and nanoelectronics for integrated information processing systems.” 

This story was first published by the UMass News Office.