About the PI Prof. D. Emma Fan Dr. D. Emma Fan is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, a core faculty member of the Materials Science and Engineering Program of the Texas Materials Institute, and an affiliated Professor in the Department of Electric and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Fan’s research exploits fundamental materials science, physics, and chemistry for innovative design, manufacturing, and applications of materials in robotics, biomedicine, 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 at a precision of 20 nm in positioning and 0.5 degrees in angle under a standard optical microscope. 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 nine granted patents, four licensed/optionally licensed to companies, and 8 pending patents and disclosures. Prof. Fan received two prestigious awards from the National Science Foundation: the NSF Mid-Career Advancement Award in 2022 and the NSF CAREER Award in 2012. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (2021) and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) (2024), where she was elected to the Board of Directors (2025) by a vote of over 2,000 Fellows. In 2025, she was named a Senior Member of the National Academy of Inventors, and has served as an Official Nominator for the Japan Prize since 2017. In recognition of her contributions to engineering and mentorship, she was selected as the 2022 Ilene Busch-Vishniac Lecturer at Johns Hopkins University; the lectureship “features outstanding women in engineering and highlights the intellectual contributions of the lecturers while serving to inspire young women to pursue degrees and careers in engineering”. Dr. Fan’s 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 was honored as a Recognized Mentor by the Siemens Foundation in 2012. She is a finalist of the 2015 SXSW Interactive Innovation Award, and a featured scientist 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. Personal Interest “Outside her work in science and technology, Prof. Fan enjoys nature, animals, literature, and arts. A reader of 19th-century European writers and philosophers, she also cherishes classical Asian poetry. She spends her free time playing music, painting, and hiking in the hills.
