Two Ph.D. Candidates Receive Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Students Abroad
03/03/2009
Ph.D. candidates Kai Xu and Jie Xu were both awarded the 2009 Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Students Abroad. This award recognizes top Chinese Ph.D. students across all fields of study in the world.
Kai Xu (pictured left), a member of Professor
Nabil Simaan's research group, is a Ph.D. student whose work focuses on statics,
kinematics, stiffness, actuation, wrench sensing, and synthesis of a snake-like
continuum robot as well as its implementation in telerobotic systems for
Minimally Invasice Surgery of the throat and Single Port Abdominal Surgery.
"This is a high honor and we are very proud that both students have been
recognized for their hard work," commented Professor Simaan.
Jie Xu (pictured left) is in his fourth year
of his Ph.D. program with Professor Daniel Attinger's research group. His
current work focuses on
experimental and numerical study on microscale bubble/drop dynamics with
microfluidic applications. He has published five journal articles
including a "best JMM paper of the year" (among 31 others) and he is
a reviewer for two journals "Journal of Micromechanics and
Microengineering" and "Microfluidics and Nanofluidics"."I am very proud of Jie's
award. Four years ago he was hired from the prestigious Tsinghua University
where he had done some nice research on heat transfer through coconuts. Jie
expressed and developed his skills in many projects we have done since. He is an amazing character, extremely sharp,
funny, generous and dedicated. His scientific curiosity has no bounds and I
wish him lots of future successes," commented Prof. Attinger. Jie is also a full member of
Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society and member of several other
professional societies including ASME.