Deyu Li is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Vanderbilt University.  He received his B.E. in Engineering Thermophysics from the University of Science and Technology of China (1992), M.E. in Mechanical Engineering from Tsinghua University, China (1997), and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley (2002), respectively.  After working as a post-doctoral research fellow at UC Berkeley in 2003, Dr. Li joined the faculty of Vanderbilt Mechanical Engineering as an assistant professor in January 2004. Dr. Li was promoted to associate professor in 2010 and full professor in 2016.

Brandon Stacks

Brandon Stacks was accepted into Vanderbilt University in 2019. Before that, he attended the University of Tennessee at Martin (UTM) from 2015 to 2019 for his Bachelor’s degree in engineering with a mechanical engineering concentration. He enjoys watching Manchester City, playing video games, and attending concerts. His research focuses on an energy storage device known as the electrochemical flow capacitor (EFC).

Tao Hong

Tao Hong is a Ph.D. student in the Interdisciplinary Material Science program. He is working on integrating microfluidics and metasurfaces to realize an optofluidic system to classify fluorescent immune cells on a point-of-care platform. Machine learning is implemented for the metasurface design optimization and classification model construction. He likes playing Japanese martial arts – kendo, and fishing on Percy Priest Lake in his spare time.

Zhiliang Pan

Zhiliang Pan graduated from Xi’an Jiaotong University with a B.E. in 2018. He joined the MNTFL lab in the fall of 2018 as a PhD student working on thermal transport in low-dimensional polar nanostructures. After defending his Ph.D. in May 2023, he stayed as a postdoctoral scholar in the group to further expand his Ph.D. research on the strong thermal effects of surface phonon polaritons (SPhPs) in polar nanostructures. He enjoys playing badminton/tennis, watching sports streaming, and hiking in his spare time.

Xiaoyuan Huang

Xiaoyuan Huang graduated from Franklin and Marshall College with a B.A. in Mathematics and then earned both a B.S. and M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL). In 2023, Xiaoyuan joined a research group as a Ph.D. student, focusing on nanowire thermal transport.