Hu,Youfan received her Ph.D. degree in Physical Electronics from Peking University, Beijing, China in 2008. She is currently a Tenured Associate Professor in the School of Electronics at Peking University. Before joining Peking University, she worked as post-doctoral fellow and research scientist in Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA. Her research interests include high performance nanosensors, carbon nanotube based integrated circuits, energy harvesting technology, and integrated smart sensor system.

Dr. Hu has published over 40 peer reviewed journal articles with a citation exceed 3,000 times. Most of them are published in top journals, such as Advanced Materials, Nano Letters, ACS Nano, Advanced Functional Materials and Nano Energy. 9 of these publications are ESI Highly Cited Papers. The related works have been extensively reported by MIT Technology Review, Science News, Science Daily, PhysOrg, EE Times, etc. She holds 4 US patents and 3 Chinese patents. She is serving as an Associate Editor of IEEE Transaction on Nanotechnology. In 2017, Dr. Hu has awarded the International Association of Advanced Materials (IAAM) Scientist Medal for the year.

Dr. Hu's research achievements are summarized as follows:

1) Weak environment energy harvesting technology and self-powered system: Harvesting energy from its working environment can make the WSN more sustainable and powerful. Dr. Hu overcomes the challenge of energy harvesting efficiency and improves the nanogenerator’s output to the level of a practical power source. Driving of small electronic devices and self-powered environment sensing system with wireless data transmission function was demonstrated for the first time. Also special mechanical structure and low-loss power management circuit is designed for weak energy harvesting purpose.

2) High performance nanosensors: Surface and interface related processes play key roles on the performance of sensor. These processes are systematically explored. High performance sensor can be achieved by means of optimized device structure design, packaging and coupling effects.

3) Flexible carbon nanotube integrated circuits: As the core unit of electronic systems, integrated circuits (ICs) of high performance simultaneous with media-scale integration for build-in biological data computation, operation and analysis in a timely manner is very important. High-performance carbon nanotube based flexible integrated circuits with bio-integration capability are fabricated for the increasing demand in clinical and biological applications.