We are thrilled to announce that Dr. D. Emma Fan has been elected to the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering board of directors, a prestigious position voted on by the AIMBE Fellows—an esteemed group of approximately 2,000 members within the society. Dr. Fan’s election marks a significant achievement and reflects her dedication and contributions to the field. She looks forward to contributing her expertise and collaborating with fellow board members to drive the continued advancement of medical and biological engineering!
Congratulations Dr. Fan!
About Dr. Fan: Dr. D. Emma Fan is a Professor in the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering and a faculty member of the Materials Science and Engineering Program and the Texas Materials Institute at The University of Texas at Austin.
Dr. Fan received two prestigious awards from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the NSF Mid-Career Advancement Award (2022) and the NSF CAREER Award (2012). Dr. Fan is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, a Fellow AIMBE, and a Senior Member of The National Academy of Inventors. She has been serving an invited Official Nominator of the Japan Prize since 2017 and as an invited nominator of the VinFuture Prize since 2024. Dr. Fan received the 2022 Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering Ilene Busch-Vishniac lectureship, which "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".
Prof. Fan's research program focuses on the fabrication, manipulation, and assembly of intelligent, active micro/nanoscale structures, 3D hierarchical porous materials, and stimulus-responsive materials via understanding and exploiting fundamental materials science, physics, and chemistry. The efforts aim at addressing critical problems in robotics, sensing, biomedicine, and water treatment. She also develops precision tools used in biomedical research. 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 with 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. Dr. Fan is committed to translating technologies developed in her lab into broader societal impact through technology transfer and entrepreneurship. She has invented nine granted patents and holds several pending ones, with two patents licensed or optionally licensed to companies.
