Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics
Professor
Dr. Nanshu Lu received her PhD degree in Mechanics of Materials from Harvard University in June, 2009. Afterwards, she received the Beckman Postdoctoral Fellowship and spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher in the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). She joined the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin) as Assistant Professor in August 2011. She became Associate Professor with tenure in September 2017. She received Temple Foundation Endowed Teaching Fellowship in Engineering #1 starting September 2018.
Dr. Lu currently holds courtesy appointments in the Departments of Biomedical Engineering (BME), Eectrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), Mechanical Engineering (ME), and the Texas Materials Institute (TMI) at UT-Austin. She is now leading a multidisciplinary research group to advance the mechanics, materials, electronics, and bio-integration of soft electronics. Her lab is currently working on five major research thrusts: 1) mechanics of micro-bubbles and tents; 2) nano & 2D materials; 3) manufacture and transfer of soft electronics; 4) bio-electronics interface; and 5) soft bioelectronics systems. Representative work of her group includes mechanics of 2D material bubbles and large-deformation micro-blisters, graphene e-tattoos (GETs), “cut-solder-paste” manufacture of active e-tattoos, Cartan transfer of large-area electronic tattoos (e-tattoos), mechanics of crater-enabled physical adhesives, as well as modular and multimodal e-tattoos.
Dr. Lu has published more than 90 peer reviewed journal articles so far (with more than 16,000 citations according to Google Scholar), many of which have appeared in high impact journals such as Science, Nature Materials, Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Photonics, Nature Communications, Advance Materials, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), Physical Review Letters (PRL), Nano Letters, ACS Nano, and so on. Her current h-index is 50. She has 2 granted and 4 pending patents. She has presented more than 140 invited talks at major conferences including National Academy of Engineering Frontier of Engineering (NAS FoE) symposium, The Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas (TAMEST) annual conference, Materials Research Society (MRS) meetings, ASME International Mechanical Engineering Conference & Exposition (IMECE), International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (IUTAM) Symposium, Society of Engineering Science (SES) technical meetings, SPIE conferences, and peer institutes. Her research has been highlighted by news media such as Nature News, Science Online, NSF Science360 News, MIT Technology Review, CNN News, BBC News, NPR, IEEE Spectrum and so on. She has been honored with the NSF CAREER award, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) and Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Programs, the MIT’s Technology Review 35 under 35 award, the 3M Nontenured Faculty Award, the iCANx/ACS Nano Rising Star lectureship, and the NetExplo Grand Prix. She is a fellow of IAAM (International Association of Advanced Materials) and a senior member of IEEE. Dr. Lu was also selected as one of the five great innovators on campus by UT Austin Central Communications in 2016 and one of the five world-changing women at UT Austin in 2019. She is enlisted as one of the 2020 Web of Science Highly Cited Researchers.
Dr. Lu has been very active in serving the community. She was the founding Associate Editor of Soft Robotics (IF=6.160) and is now Associate Editor for Journal of Applied Mechanics (IF = 2.671). She has been the chair of the ASME Applied Mechanics Division “Integrated Structures” Technical committee since 2012. She has organized eight symposia and one track for international conferences and has served as the proposal reviewer for many federal agencies and the technical reviewer for many peer