Featured Faculty Friday: Xian Du

Xian Du is this week's IALS Associated Faculty member. He is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering and part of the IALS Center for Personalized Health Monitoring (CPHM). Du's research focuses on the scale up of flexible electronics printing processes from lab to industry using high-precision in-line inspection and pattern recognition technologies for large surface quality control. He also works on automatic, high resolution, accurate, and robust imaging tools for medical devices for noninvasive detection and description of biomarkers.

Below, you will find our interview with Xian Du: 

Q: What is the focus of your research?
A: 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. My techniques have also been developed for automatic, accurate, and robust computation tools in medical devices for quantitative assessment of clinical images.

Q: Why did you choose to come to UMass? 
A: 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. Amherst has a friendly community for my family life.
 
Q: How large is your lab? 
A: My lab has 10-15 students every semester including undergrad, graduate, and post-doc from MIE, ECE, CICS, and BME.

Below is a quote from my NSF REU student, Peter Dimeo (Junior of MIE)
“Here at the Intelligent Sensing Lab at UMass, we have ten students covering many aspects of machine intelligence. Despite being relatively small, the student’s research in R2R flexible electronics and machine sensing have made valuable contributions to innovating industry sensing.”

Q: Do you use any novel techniques or tools, or work with any unique materials for your research?
A: We attempt to invent intelligent sensing novel techniques and build roll to roll machines by ourselves. We invent AI techniques for various sensor data of roll to roll machines and medical imagers. 
 
Q: Have there been any major advances in your field or the technologies used in research since you were a grad student? 
A: Yes, camera, computers, AI techniques, and data networks all have major advances in printing processes. I always told my students “Well, when I was in school we didn’t have such a powerful GPU,…” 

Q; What is the most useful tool in your lab, and why?
A: The most useful tools in my lab are common screwdrivers, Allan keys, wrenches, duct tapes because we are building machines.

Q: What is your proudest moment ever? (science related or otherwise)
A: My first Ph.D. student Jingyang Yan had his first research paper published in a top journal. 

Q: Assuming your research is widely successful, how will it impact society?
A: Wearables will be massively produced automatically and accurately by roll to roll printing techniques with the AI-driven quality monitoring and control.

Q: What is your favorite book/movie/tv show? 
A: Forrest Gump

Q: Where is your favorite place to travel, or where would you like to travel? A: South of France. I love the food, culture, castles there. 

Q: What is a new skill/hobby that you would like to learn? 
A: Tennis. 

Q: What is something about you that no-one else knows? 
A: I was a fat boy.

Q: What is one challenge from COVID that you successfully overcame?
A: Working with my students
 
Q: Does the love of science run in your family?
A: Yes. Without such a love of science in my family, I might have stayed in the small village at the foot of TaiHang Mountain in China for my whole life.
 
Q: What was your worst job ever?
A: I installed an owl house at the backyard for my son. However, no owl moved in.

Q: Who do you admire and why?
A: Thomas Edison. He invented thousands of innovative tools for human life.

Q: Where did you grow up?
A: A small village at the foot of TaiHang Mountain. 

Q: Have you ever had a job in industry?
A: Yes, I had been a mechanical engineer in a factory, and software engineer in a printing company.

Xian Du headhsot