Xin Zhang to Deliver DeLisi Lecture

To recognize their contributions to engineering and society, Xin Zhang, a College of Engineering professor (ME, ECE, BME, MSE), is the recipient of this year’s Charles DeLisi Award and Lecture, and Wilson Wong, an ENG assistant professor (BME), has received the Early Career Excellence Award.

The Charles DeLisi Award and Lecture recognizes faculty members with extraordinary records of well-cited scholarship, senior leaders in industry and extraordinary entrepreneurs who have invented and mentored transformative technologies that impact our quality of life, and provides the recipient with a public forum to discuss his or her work before the Boston University academic community and the general public.

Zhang will present the Charles DeLisi Distinguished Lecture “Tailoring Electromagnetic and Acoustic Waves with MEMS and Metamaterials” on Thursday, April 12, at 4 pm in the Rajen Kilachand Center for Integrated Life Sciences & Engineering.

Xin Zhang has been a member of the BU faculty since 2002, and is a professor of mechanical engineering, electrical and computer engineering, biomedical engineering, materials science and engineering, and the Photonics Center. She leads an interdisciplinary team of researchers focused on fundamental and applied aspects of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS and its descendent NEMS or micro/nanosystems). Her research group—the Laboratory for Microsystems Technology—seeks to understand and exploit interesting characteristics of physics, materials, mechanics, and manufacturing technologies with forward-looking engineering efforts and practical applications ranging from energy to healthcare to homeland security.

Zhang has published more than 140 papers in interdisciplinary journals. She served as associate chair for mechanical engineering graduate programs at BU from 2008 to 2011, and is now associate director of the BU Nanotechnology Innovation Center and director of both the National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Experience for Undergraduates and the NSF Research Experiences for Teachers site in Integrated Nanomanufacturing at BU.

She has received numerous awards for research and education excellence and was both a US and EU-US National Academy of Engineering Invitee. In 2009, she was named the inaugural Distinguished Faculty Fellow, an appointment given to tenured engineering faculty at Boston University who are on a clear trajectory toward an exemplary career in all dimensions of science and engineering. In 2016, she was selected as the recipient of the IEEE Sensors Council Technical Achievement Award (advanced career) for distinguished contributions to micro/nanoelectromechanical systems. She is a fellow of AAAS, AIMBE, ASME, IEEE, and OSA, and an associate fellow of AIAA.

The Early Career Research Excellence Award celebrates the significant, recent, high-impact research achievements of exemplary tenure-track faculty who are within 10 years of receiving their PhD.

Assistant Professor Wilson Wong (BME) is the College of Engineering’s 2018 Early Career Excellence Award winner. A member of the BU faculty since 2012, Wong’s research is in the development of mammalian synthetic biology for cancer immunotherapy and other medical applications. In recognition of his innovative research, Wong received the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s New Innovator Award 2013 and National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Award in 2016. One of his recent papers from Nature Biotechnology has been recognized by multiple news outlets, including WIRED and Science. That paper details a new method to make it easier for synthetic biologists to build new, complex genetic circuits that respond to environmental stimuli within a cell. Wong’s method—called Boolean logic and arithmetic through DNA excision (BLADE)—has many applications within scientific research. In addition to allowing synthetic biologists to build and test genetic circuits, BLADE can be used to engineer specific cell types to use in cancer and neurodegenerative disease research.