Dr. Fan's research program focuses on bridging fabrication of nano-functional materials with their applications via exploiting fundamental physical and chemical principles for innovative manufacturing and applications of nanomaterials in biochemical sensing, single live cell stimulation, MEMS/NEMS, and energy conversion and storage devices. Dr. Fan invented a powerful nanomanipulation technique, the "electric tweezers", which can transport arrays of nanoparticles in both the X and Y directions with prescribed trajectories at a precision of at least 150 nm and rotate them with completely controlled angle, speed, and chirality. Dr. Fan's lab has the following active research areas:

(1) innovative mechanisms for nanomanufacturing, assembling, and manipulation

supported by the National Institutes of Health

(2) Optical biochemical sensing, single-molecule detection, surface enhanced Raman scattering, plasmonics, plasmonic-semiconductor hybrid devices; Single live cell stimulation and biosignal delivery

supported by the National Institutes of Health and Army Research Office

(4) Bottom up assembly of nanoelectromechanical devices such as nanomotors, nanorobots, and nanoresonators for sensing, communication, controlled biochemical release and detection

supported by the National Science Foundation CAREER Award.

(5) Novel design and synthetic concept of 3-D nanosuperstructures for energy conversion and storage devices

supported by the Welch Foundation.

Our education goal is to train the next-generation scientists and engineers, who are creative, independent, and also exhibit the highest level of research ethics. We are always on the lookout for talented and enthusiastic graduate and undergraduate students to join our research group.