Nianqiang Wu and Qiangfei Xia Make Annual List of World’s Most Highly Cited Researchers

Content

Nianqiang Wu and Qiangfei Xia

Nianqiang Wu, the Armstrong-Siadat Endowed Professor in Materials Science and Engineering in the Chemical Engineering (ChE) Department, and Professor Qiangfei Xia of the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department are two of the 12 UMass Amherst faculty members listed among the world’s “Highly Cited Researchers” for 2023. 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.  

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.

Wu also made the list of Highly Cited Researchers in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022. This is Xia's second consecutive year making the list. 

As Wu explains about his Wu Research Group in the ChE department, “Our research aims to gain fundamental understanding of charge transfer and energy transfer in electrochemical and optoelectronic​ materials and devices and to transform fundamental knowledge to practical applications to address technical challenges in medical diagnosis and renewable energy sustainability.”

Wu’s lab works in four diverse areas of interplay: photocatalysis and photo-electrochemical catalysis for environmental and energy sustainability; electrochemical energy storage; biosensors, microfluidics, lab-on-chips, and point-of-care testing devices for healthcare and environmental monitoring; and photodynamic therapy, drug delivery, bio-imaging, and precision medicine.

Wu is a Fellow of the Electrochemical Society, the Royal Society of Chemistry, and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. He earned his Ph.D. and M.Sc. in Materials Science and Engineering from Zhejiang University in China, and he holds a B.Sc. in Metallic Materials and Technology from that same university.

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.

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. (November 2023)