Research Interests:

Dr. Fan’s research focus is to develop technologies in microfluidics, sensors, and biomedical micro-electro-mechanical systems (BioMEMS). Recently, he is developing a novel hydrogen sensor using a biology-inspired mechanism and microfluidic technology. A reliable hydrogen sensor is required due to the fact that hydrogen is the fuel of today’s space vehicle and possible alternative to our current fossil-based transportation fuels, and it is a flammable gas. Dr. Fan is an earlier practitioner of microfluidics technology; his work resulted in several pioneering papers including one in Science (1993). He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Ames Laboratory of the US Department of Energy in 1994. From 1995 to 2000, Hugh was a Member of the Technical Staff at Sarnoff Corp. (Princeton, NJ), the research headquarter of defunct RCA Corporation. As a Principal Scientist at ACLARA BioSciences Inc. (Mountain View, CA) from 2000 to 2002, Hugh managed a multi-million-dollar project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA). Dr. Fan served several times as an expert panel reviewer of the National Institute of Health, as a proposal reviewer for the Department of the Army and the National Science Foundation, as a reviewer for journals including Science, Journal of American Chemical Society, Nano Letters, Analytical Chemistry, and Lab on a chip, and as an instructor of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Continuing Education Institute. He holds 6 US patents and has authored more than 30 scientific publications and book chapters.