Dr. Xiaolong Hu is a professor in the School of Precision Instrument and Optoelectronic Engineering at Tianjin University. He obtained his B. S. and M. S. degrees from Tsinghua University in 2003 and 2006, respectively, and obtained his Ph. D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2011. His Ph. D. thesis is relevant to superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs). After postdoctoral training in the US, he joined Tianjin University as a full professor in 2014; and since then he has been leading Nanophotonics Group (http://nanophotonics.tju.edu.cn/). 

Professor Hu is a member of the Optical Society of America, IEEE, and SPIE. In 2013, he was awarded OSA Outstanding Reviewer Award; in 2014, he was awarded Peiyang Scholarship by Tianjin University; in 2016, he was honored as Young Talents of Science and Technology by Tianjin City. He is now serving as an associate editor of OSA Continuum, a committee member of the superconducting-electronics sub-society, Electronic Society of China, and the faculty advisor for the OSA Student Chapter and the SPIE Student Chapter at Tianjin University.

Professor Hu’s research focuses on nanophotonic devices and nanofabrication, and is also relevant to mode-division multiplexing technology and stretchable electronics. In his Ph. D. thesis work at MIT, He did the early demonstration of a fiber-coupled SNSPD system with efficiency exceeding 20% (Optics Letters 2009), applied the SNSPD system in quantum optic measurement with collaborators (Optics Letters 2010), and was the first to propose the waveguide-integrated SNSPDs (IEEE TAS 2009). Recently at Tianjin University he uncovered two mechanisms of device timing jitter of SNSPDs (two back-to-back papers in Applied Physics Letters 2017), proposed and demonstrated the fractal SNSPDs with low polarization sensitivity (Optics Letters 2018, Optics Letters 2020), proposed the superconducting nanowire multi-photon detectors integrated with current reservoirs (Photonics Research 2020), and designed the electrically-injected semiconductor photon-pair sources working at the wavelength of 1.3 micrometer (IEEE JSTQE 2018). As a major co-inventor, he co-invented a nanofabrication process to seamlessly integrate commercial electronic and optoelectronic components into mechanically stretchable systems (Advanced Materials 2011, US Patents no. 9159635, no. 9723711), and established and experimentally validated a model describing Rayleigh scattering in few-mode optical fibers (OFC 2016, Scientific Reports 2016).

Professor Hu is also interested in studying the critical-transition period in education. In 2020 he published his book, Smoothing a Critical Transition: Nontechnical Knowledge and Techniques for Student Researchers, which intended to bridge the gap between the classrooms and the laboratories and help students transit towards junior student researchers.

Professor Hu is teaching two courses at Tianjin University: a graduate-level course, Research Methodology in Optical Engineering (course number: S2020005), and an undergraduate-level course, Fundamentals of Optoelectronics (course number: 2020634). Both courses are offered in English and in the spring semesters.

With exposure to the internationally collaborative environment and trainings in the cutting-edge research projects, the graduate and undergraduate students that Professor Hu mentored have ever been awarded Excellent Master Thesis of Tianjin University, Excellent Bachelor Thesis of Tianjin University, National Scholarship, and National Award in iCAN Contest; they publish papers in international renowned journals and conferences; and after graduation, they either advance their study in the University of Tokyo, the University of Michigan, the University of Central Florida, the Eindhoven University of Technology, and Tsinghua University, or they work in industry in Sinopec, National Instruments, and Accelink Technologies.