 Good morning, everyone, and warm welcome to everyone as the weather warms up a little bit. To this event where we're going to celebrate three outstanding colleagues that have been recently promoted to associate professorships. Wenjue Wu, an industrial engineering, Meng Deng, an agricultural biological engineering, and Andres Arrieta Diaz, who's not yet here, but he'll be here shortly from the School of Mechanical Engineering. I think the heads in the room will join me in agreeing that this is one of our favorite events of the year, because we get to do three things. We get to celebrate, we get to share, and we get to collaborate. We're, of course, celebrating the success of these colleagues who, after many years of slogging hard and difficulties, they've achieved a lot to be in a place that they've been promoted, you know, with tenure. That's a great achievement, so they get to really talk about that. But a second side that we like about this series is because those that we are celebrating get to talk about the secrets of their success. There are many grad students in the room. There are many other assistant professors in the room who will be in your shoes in the coming year. So it's a great opportunity to kind of distill back and think about what is it that you did right? What decisions did these great colleagues make that helped them succeed, and so on? And lastly, it's an opportunity for collaboration, because our colleagues that we're honoring today are also going to be talking about their future vision. The next phase in their career, great things they're going to do. And because we have so many other colleagues who are in the room, it offers a great chance for collaborating with them in the future as well. So without further ado, I'd like to call upon Professor Ewarni from the School of Industrial Engineering to introduce our first honorary today. Ewarni? Thank you, Ewarni. Congratulations to all the outstanding associate professors who are highlighted today. And I will be delighted to have this opportunity to introduce Dr. Wen Zhao Wu and celebrate his success today. Dr. Wu have joined Purdue IE in 2015, and currently he is the Ravi and Eleanor Tower Rising Star Associate Professor in our school. He has received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 2005 from University of Science and Technology of China. His master's degree is in ECE from the National University of Singapore in 2008. And in 2013, he got his PhD from Georgia Tech in the material science and engineering. Dr. Wu's research interests include the design, manufacturing, and integration of nano materials for many different applications, including renewable energy, electronics, quantum devices, and wearable sensors. He is a very accomplished scholar. He published over 100 journal papers. He also has over 20 patents currently available for licensing. It's quite a sonnish record. Of course, after he had joined Purdue, his work has been recognized by many awards and I'm just going to name a few. 2019 Society of Manufacturing Engineers, Barbara Ann Borsum, of standing Young Manufacturing Engineer Award. And later on, also in the same year, he received emerging investigator from the Journal of Materials Chemistry. He also later in 2020 received Young Investigator Award for an ARO and, of course, an NSF Young, the Early Career Award in 2021 is a great highlight. And this year, he also received the College of Engineering at Purdue Faculty Excellence Award for Early Career Research. It's quite a record for such researchers. And I would like to also highlight that his work have impact many different technologies that we probably currently and also in the future that we'll see in our daily life. This will include self-power wearable sensors for monitoring health status, scalable nano-manufacturer, atomically thin materials for high-speed energy-efficient nano-electronics and quantum devices. And also, example, include biomass materials-based renewable energy harvesting for decarbonization. So now is my great pleasure to present to you Dr. Wen Zhaowu. Good morning, everybody. Good morning. So thanks, Yuen Wen, for the very nice introduction. Thanks, Yuen Wen and everybody in the college for this great event. I still recall my first attendance of this event like six years ago when we celebrate other outstanding colleagues. I think I learned a lot from those interactions. And as I talked to you earlier, I think a very great thing that I have been enjoying during the past six years here in the college at Purdue is that, usually, I got unsolicited advice and help from many senior colleagues. And I think that's what make, I think, a major part of my success if I have done anything successfully here. That is actually because of this help I received in the past few years from my colleagues in the school and also from the entire college and also from the entire university. So I'm going to show with you what I have been doing here at Purdue and also a little bit about my experience and maybe hopefully those things will be helpful and useful to the young colleagues here and also the graduate students. And at any time, if you have any questions, you can send me an email and if you'd like to talk, I'd be very happy to talk with you. So my research currently focuses on developing or establishing the nexus between artificial intelligence, nanomanufacturing, and the human. So we want to establish these nanomanufacturable materials, devices, and technology to benefit humans, human society. And recently we also started to leverage the power of artificial intelligence data science to help us design better materials, come up with more efficient manufacturing processes, and also more powerful and effective devices that can serve the purposes. And I think subtitle is not so random walk across engineering boundaries. Maybe you can tell that flavor from the first slide. So as you have been shared with you that my brag one is actually kind of a little bit diverse. I started with electric engineering, majoring in micro electronics, and then I switched my interest in material science. I want to learn more about the very fundamental basic science that leads to the powerful chips. And then I end up here at Purdue IE, which is quite different from my background. I mean, maybe six or seven years ago, I never imagined that I would be here in industrial engineering. But after spending the past six years, I truly enjoyed my work life here because I think this is something that truly distinguished me from my peers in material science and material engineering. I mean, my friends with the same backgrounds, they're still doing outstanding work in material science. And I admire that. But I think what I'm doing now is probably something that I could not imagine, but now I think I'm very proud of. So in random manufacturing, I mean, you probably have read a lot from the news that now the nation, the entire nation, many economies in the world are now putting a lot of resources in manufacturing, especially in advancing those emerging manufacturing technologies. And in particular here, for nano manufacturing, that produces nanomaterials or devices in the nanoscales with controllable properties and efficiency, and it fits a lot of fundamental scientific challenges. For example, how can we achieve this precise and production assembly where you need to precisely manufacture some materials, a very extreme case is to achieve atomic precision, right? So if you can put atoms at precise locations, organize different atoms into the same entity. And also when you have those materials, how you can organize them and assemble them across different scales. And there are many challenges here. For example, process limitations currently many of the state of our technologies cannot achieve that precision. And because of the fundamental limitations, in many cases, you could not achieve that orders assembly. And of course, in manufacturing, we talk a lot about the process-structure-profit relation. And that fundamental process-structure relations is actually unclear and unknown to many of us in the manufacturing. So our approach, we have been doing some work in the past six years or so, trying to hybridize different existing manufacturing methodologies and also with emerging ones to try to tackle this problem. For example, we hybridized the bottom-up synthesis with top-down approaches to try to overcome these multi-length-scale limitations. The second challenge is in the system-focused code design. So it's very challenging for us to get multi-performance optimization for such a complex process. This is actually, I think, a very traditional IE problem. I learned that from my colleagues in IE during the past several years. There are many existing knowledge in the traditional settings that could be potentially used for achieving this multi-objective optimization for such kind of a co-design problem. So we could leverage some existing predictive modeling and come up with new approaches based on the concepts of experimental design. So that's something actually I learned before when I was a graduate student from Georgia Tech Industrial Engineering. So the building of IE in Georgia Tech is actually next to Material Science. So the experimental design at that time seems to be a very simple concept. But later on in our research, it appears to be a very powerful approach. And there are many things still unknown and I think exciting for us to explore. The third challenge is in the tools. So when you have a lot of experimental data, so I thought some of our students here, so you can get a lot of data here in your daily research. But how can you really understand those data? A lot of machine learning work just maybe based on black box type of modeling. You don't necessarily understand what's really going on in the physics and the chemistry aspects. But for us, it's different. We have to understand what's really going on in order to better design the process to produce the materials with desired property and structures. So therefore, during the past few years, we collaborated with our colleagues in IE and also in statistics here at Purdue using the so-called interpretable machine learning or some people call it explainable machine learning approaches to help us really decipher the physics and chemistry behind those black box issues. And we have some interesting stories to experiences to use this kind of approach to help us better optimize the nano manufacturing process for materials such as 2D materials and also nanowires. And finally, because the needs for decarbonization and also for making greener future, the process itself needs to be energy efficient and also preferably using greener methods, for example, chemicals that are green and a process that are green and do not produce hazardous waste to the environment. And that inspires our exploration into biomass and bio-derived materials from the very beginning and using those materials for developing devices and the materials. So I'm going to just give you a very quick snapshot of what we have been doing during the past few years here at Purdue. All of these examples actually represent our efforts and the dedication to explore those hybrid approaches, data-driven and for making devices that include automotive materials and top-down structures, as well as those biomass materials. In many cases, otherwise-wasted material, for example, in this case, the lignin is a normally-dumped material during the pavement-making process. Most people focus on cell rest, but we successfully convert this lignin material into a stretchable, wearable sensor that can help us monitor the heartbeat. And also, in many cases, one thing I want to share is that, even though I'm presenting today as I designed everything from the very beginning, everything is planned, actually, that's not the truth. Most of the things we, most of our discoveries actually were unexpected. We're unexpected. I never saw that we could develop this 2D telerine material because telerine elements has a very string chain structure. And based on that chain structure, you would never think about making 2D form out of this material because it's endoscopy. And I did not expect that. But at the very beginning, when I helped my student taking SEM, scanning electron microscope images in the material science department, all of a sudden, we observed a very small flake of ribbon-type material out of a bunch of nanowires. And starting from there, we were successful and also a lot of work required to convert that process into a 2-dimensional growth process. And now, this telerine material actually has already attracted a lot of attention and interest from other top schools and also from other countries. And many people are now interested in this one for nanotronics, for quantum devices. And of course, the success of our research in telerine up to this point also has received a lot of help, good collaborations here from colleagues from ECE, from a computer years group, and also then a Weissen group. So many, many good collaborations that help us to achieve what we can do now. So a quick snapshot of my research activity here. So I want to emphasize again, all of the success were not possible if there were no good collaboration here. And I think Purdue, that's something I want to emphasize. And I really want to highlight again, I think especially within College of Engineering, I think collaboration is truly outstanding. I think all the collaboration here I have been working with other colleagues are all very successful. Of course, there are some, sometimes we have arguments, but I think in the end, I receive a lot of help. I mean, academic discussion arguments has always happened. And that's why I always challenge my students intellectually. I think one day I received a comment from my previous master student. He told me that. I still remember that you keep asking me why, for every question, for every point, everything I present in the slides. I think that's something maybe may help the student to think more critically of everything. And also that's something I always ask myself. So my mentoring activities here, so up to now I've graduated four PhDs. So one of them is doing post-doc. The other is being a faculty in China and two working in industry. And also I think I'm very proud of my undergraduate mentoring activities, especially the fulfillment and the joy I received when interacting with those undergraduate students. So you feel you really can do something big that changes maybe their mindset, maybe even their pathways or careers in life. And I have the opportunity and the privilege to mentor 53 undergraduate students on junior past six years. And I hope that those are good experience for them. And also the broader impacts and the engagement. And also I think one thing I want to highlight is that during the pandemic, the college provided generous support to us, the first cohort of these virtual labs faculty. And this work is still ongoing. And the purpose is to develop virtual lab components for large lab settings. Especially, for example, in the manufacturing process, we have limited space. Every time we can only accommodate a few students. But with the help of the virtual lab development, hopefully in the future we will be able to accommodate everybody in the lab in one setting. So with that, I'd like to thank everybody in my group and also all the outstanding colleagues here in the college, in the department, in the school. And also the staffs here, in IE, in college, in pre-award, post-award, everything. And of course, thank you all for coming to my session today. Thank you very much. I'd be happy to answer questions. We have time for a few questions. Thank you, Wenzhou. Yeah, it's great, it's very astonishing to see your achievement. So I see one slide you mentioned. So you advised 53 undergraduate students from IE, EC, ME, and BME, different departments. So I was wondering how do we kind of reach out and how did you have undergraduate students from a wide range of different departments? I think there are a few reasons why I could do that. The first thing is the support from IE, because our colleagues in IE, they are not rigid. They are like, oh, you cannot advise students from other departments. We are always welcome you to do that. And also because we are doing multidisciplinary research, and my background, as you can tell, is actually I did not have a degree in IE. All right, the other day we were joking that many of our new colleagues in IE don't even have a degree in IE. So the second thing I think is in the beginning, as young faculty, I think we need to reach out to actively recruit those students, to let other people know we are here. Because for example, in my case, maybe other students know I'll graduate from Georgia Tech with a material science degree, but if they look into Purdue material science, maybe they cannot find me. They don't know I'm in IE here. So in the beginning, maybe you need to reach out more actively. And I think, yeah, that's probably something you could try, I guess. You got them. Yeah, we did ask a good question. Thank you so much. And Wendo, this is really a fantastic opportunity to see your work and highlight your success. I wonder if you share your secret about tech management. With the rest of us, because I can see you have so much on your plate and many, many projects and collaboration. How do you manage your time? Honestly, I think I'm still learning that. That's really honest, because the other day I talked with my students that I told them that in the first maybe four years or so, before 10 years, I was trying to do everything perfectly. So I want to get everything perfectly done. Then gradually I realized I could not manage that. It's not possible for me to do everything perfectly done. So I have to gradually adapt to get things done instead of get things perfectly done. At least get things done before deadline, especially for those important proposals like NSF and other things. You cannot miss deadline. So I think we only have 24 hours a day. And of course, pretend your life is quite challenging, especially for colleagues with family with little kids. I think to that I like to thank my wife who is not here today. And also she spent a lot of time taking care of my kids and my family supporting that. So I still remember that in the first three years, I came to office. That doesn't say I'm not coming to office now. I came to office very late in the evening. Sometimes you have to do some things because you don't have that time. And without the support from my family, I cannot do that. But I think maybe at some point I need to change the mindset from get things perfectly done to get things done. I think that's more important. I realize that. Maybe that's not 100% right, but I'm still learning, I guess. That was a softball question. I'm going to lodge a complaint. Now, there are many ways to evaluate excellence of research and impact. One of which is publishing one, not the only way, but one of which is publishing science and nature. So my complaint is that when you are publishing science and nature faster than I can catch up to read. So let that be on the record. So that's not a question, but I want to say congratulations to you and to the other two colleagues for all the ones who are celebrating in the Associate Professor series. Thank you. Thank you. I think to that, first, I need to catch up with that. To match up with your... Because I already have students complaining about, okay, you need to review my papers faster because I need to graduate. I think Purdue has a very large college engineering, and we have a lot of resources here, facilities, basic facilities, not mentioning the hardware, the tools, but also the staff teams. And that actually did not become apparent to me until I talked to my colleagues from other schools. I think to that, I'm very grateful. Thank you. Thank you.