Qiangfei Xia Makes Annual List of World’s Most Highly Cited Researchers

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Qiangfei Xia, Dev and Linda Gupta Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), is one of the 6 UMass Amherst faculty members listed among the world’s “Highly Cited Researchers” for 2024. This highly anticipated annual analysis by Clarivate Analytics, owner of the Web of Science, identifies researchers who have demonstrated significant influence in their chosen fields through the publication of multiple highly cited papers during the last decade. This is Xia's third consecutive year making the list.

Since 2001, the Highly Cited Researchers™ list has listed research scientists and social scientists worldwide who have demonstrated exceptional influence through their published papers. The methodology that determines this “who’s who” of influential researchers draws on the data and analysis performed by bibliometric experts and data scientists at the Institute for Scientific Information.

As Xia says about his Nanodevices and Integrated System Lab in the ECE department, “To address the size, weight, and power consumption issues of deep neural networks, we believe computing systems built upon emerging devices and nanotechnology, for instance memristors, offer an attractive solution. A memristor…is an electronic device whose internal resistance state is dependent on the history of the current and/or voltage it has experienced.”

Xia adds that “Using the conductance state to represent synaptic weight, non-volatile memristors do not need external power to maintain the states.” As he says, “Our goal is to build an energy efficient hardware platform using these emerging electronic devices.”

Xia's research interests include beyond-CMOS devices, integrated systems, and enabling technologies, with applications in machine intelligence, reconfigurable RF systems, and hardware security.

Working on such research, Xia has received a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Young Faculty Award, a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, and the Barbara H. and Joseph I. Goldstein Outstanding Junior Faculty Award.

Most recently, earlier this year Xia was selected to receive $23 million of funding from the CHIPS and Science Act, under the DoD Microelectronics Commons program, to help transfer UMass Amherst innovations in CMOS+memristor technology to U.S. semiconductor manufacturers for applications in low-energy edge AI processing.  

Xia received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University, where he was a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in Engineering (a graduate fellowship from Princeton). He earned his M.S. and B.E. from Shanghai Jiao Tong University.