Huan Wu

Every year, hundreds of people with various expertise move to the Valley of the Sun to join Arizona State University in the pursuit of excellence, broad access to quality education and meaningful societal impact.

Huan Wu chose to embark on the next chapter of his career at ASU for similar but slightly different reasons. 

“ASU has a strong commitment to interdisciplinary research and innovation, particularly in engineering and materials science,” he says. “I was drawn by its rapidly growing investments in semiconductor science, which aligns well with my goals of developing next-generation computational tools and materials for microelectronics and energy technologies.”

Wu joins ASU from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he pursued his doctoral studies in micro-nano engineering and was a postdoctoral researcher. 

With expertise in essential fields such as nanoscale energy transport, Wu is an accomplished researcher whose work has been published in high-impact journals such as Nature and Science. 

“The work I contributed to on electrically-gated molecular thermal switches was selected as one of the ‘Top Ten Semiconductor Stories’ in 2023 by IEEE Spectrum,” he says.

An assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering in the School for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy, part of Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at ASU, Wu will be teaching a course on aircraft propulsion. He is keen to turn students into engineers capable of making a difference in the field and beyond.

“My students should expect to develop critical thinking and independent learning capabilities, which are becoming increasingly important in modern engineering and technology,” Wu says.

Besides teaching, he plans to leverage the resources available at ASU to take his research to new heights. He says that the interdisciplinary nature of the Fulton Schools is a conducive environment for the kind of research group he envisions. 

“I am also looking forward to building a collaborative research group that bridges fundamental physics and real-world applications,” he says. “ASU is the right place to advance my work in nanoscale energy transport through quantum-physics-based approaches. I hope to make meaningful contributions by exploring the unknown and advancing technologies that shape the future.”

Meet the newest faculty members of the Fulton Schools of Engineering here.

Written by Roger Ndayisaba