Dr. Donglei “Emma” Fan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and a core faculty member of the Materials Science and Engineering Program, Texas Materials Institute at The University of Texas at Austin. She holds the Robert & Jane Mitchell Endowed Faculty Fellowship in Engineering since 2017. Prof. Fan received her bachelor’s degree in the Department of Intensive Instruction (DII), an honor program for talented undergraduate students, from Nanjing University (NJU), two master’s degrees in Materials Science and Electric Engineering, respectively, and doctorate (2007) degree in Materials Science and Engineering from The Johns Hopkins University (JHU).
Dr. Fan’s research focuses on exploiting the fundamental materials science, physics, and chemistry for innovative design, manufacturing, and applications of materials in robotics, biomedicine, such as biosensing and single-cell stimulation, and energy and environmental remediation devices. She is an inventor of the patent awarded “Electric Tweezers” technique that can precisely manipulate longitudinal nanoscale materials in aqueous suspension by combined AC and DC electric fields. Her team also discovered the effect of light-semiconductor-electric-field interaction that can be applied to realize multimodal reconfigurable nanodevices. Prof. Fan’s research has spurred a series of publications in leading journals, including Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Communications, Science Advances, the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, Physical Review Letters, and Advanced Materials. She is an inventor of seven granted patents, one licensed to a startup, and a few pending patents.
Prof. Fan is a Fellow of the Royal Chemical Society (2021) and has served as an invited Japan Prize Official Nominator since 2017. In 2012, Prof. Fan received the prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER Award. Her work on the bottom-up assembling of artificial nanomotors was included in Science Year by Year, DK Smithsonian in 2017 and selected as the #3 of “10 discoveries that will shape the future in 2014” by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Focus magazine. She received the Texas Health Catalyst Consulting Award in 2020, and was honored as a Recognized Mentor by the Siemens Foundation in 2012. She has been an invited member of the Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society since 2020, and was one of 30 US young engineers, invited to attend the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) 2013 EU-US Frontier of Engineering Symposium in France. She was an invitee to the National (NAS) Arab-American Frontiers of Science, Engineering, and Medicine symposium in 2014. She was a finalist of the Beckman Young Investigator Award (24 finalists nationwide), a finalist of the 2015 SXSW Interactive Innovation Award, and was featured by “Woman in Nanoscience” an NSF-supported scientific blog highlighting achievements of woman scientists in the US. She received an NSF graduate student award to attend NEMS summer school at The California Institute of Technology in 2006. Exempted from the National College Examination, she received early admission to the honor program for talented undergraduates in NJU and was awarded the Freshman Scholarship (1995). She won multiple prestigious prizes in various academic competitions in Physics (both national and provincial), Biology (provincial), and Mathematics (regional) in high school and middle school.
Personal Interest
Besides science and technology, Prof. Fan enjoys nature, animals, reading, music, and art. She has been much influenced by the 19th-century European writers and thoughts proposed by some German philosophers. She adores classical Asian poetry and also spends her free time playing the piano, painting, working out, and trailing in the hills.
