Xiaozhou (Michael) Fan

Mechanical/Aerospace Engineering

• Email: xiaozhoufan@hkust-gz.edu.cn
• Website: https://xiaozhoufan.github.io/
  

Research Experience

Sept. 2025 – Now

Assistant Professor, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)

• Sustainable Energy and Environment Thrust;
• Website: https://facultyprofiles.hkust-gz.edu.cn/faculty-personal-page/FAN-Xiaozhou/xiaozhoufan

Postdoctoral Scholar Research Associate, Caltech

Sept. 2023 – Aug. 2025
Advisor: Prof. Morteza Gharib (mgharib@caltech.edu; website)

• Project lead: fight autonomy in extreme winds. Designed, fabricated and calibrated an in-house air data system for real-time gust sensing. Greatly reducing piece-wise cost.
• Instrumented onboard sensing system and avionics for fixed-wing drone; designed and built an automated testing environment to test flight control. Architect a framework to learn the flight mechanics of the drone with data-driven approach.
• Implemented flight controllers in real-time with dynamically changing gusty environment.
• Organizing the bi-weekly AI journal club within group.

Fellow, Brown Technology Innovations

Aug. 2022 – Aug. 2023
Advisor: Mr. Brian Demers

• Assessed the commercial potential of early-stage technologies, evaluated industry interest, developed marketing strategies, and composed technical reports and pitch documents.

Graduate Research Assistant, Breuer Lab

Jan. 2019 – Aug. 2023
Advisor: Prof. Kenneth Breuer (kbreuer@brown.edu; website)

• Developed theoretical dynamical models with wing-body interaction, inertial and aerodynamic effects to predict motion of flapping wing flight and energetics.
• Investigated the energetics of animal flight under different flight speeds, highlighting the impact of wing camber on performance.
• Designed and fabricated a robotic flapping wing platform to study unsteady aerodynamic phenomena, contributing to efficient, quiet drones with large payload capability.
• Led and won the Hyundai Visionary Challenge award ($200,000 research fund) on the development of robust bat-inspired aerial robotics.

Graduate Research Assistant, High Performance Computational Fluid Dynamics Lab

Jan. 2016 – March 2018
Advisor: Prof. Danesh Tafti (dtafti@exchange.vt.edu)

• Devised an algorithm, integrating it into the in-house N-S incompressible solver GenIDLEST, representing bat wing kinematics as a thin surface in the IBM framework.
• Developed a mathematical formulation decomposing articulated bat wing kinematics into five canonical descriptors (flapping, stroke-plane deviation, twisting, chord- and span-wise cambering), performed CFD simulations (LES), and analyzed flow fields.

Graduate Research Assistant, SDU - Virginia Tech International Laboratory

May 2016 – Aug. 2016
Advisor: Prof. Rolf Muller (rolf.mueller@vt.edu)

• Constructed a flight tunnel and participated in motion capture experiments with bats in flight.

National Undergraduate Training Programs for Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Dec. 2011 – Nov. 2013
Advisor: Prof. Xianmin Zhang (zhangxm@scut.edu.cn)

• Designed a flapping wing mechanism mimicking bird or bat wing folding during upstroke, completed its mathematical modeling and preliminary efficiency analysis.

Publications

Peer-Reviewed Journal

• YX Su*, XZ Fan*, K Onoue, H Vejdani, K Breuer, “An Improved Aerodynamic Model for Quasi-Steady Simulations of Animal Flight at Moderate Reynolds Numbers”. *Equal contribution. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (2025).
• XZ Fan, A Bortoni, S Hao, S Swartz, and K Breuer, “Upstroke wing clapping in bats and bat-inspired robots offers efficient lift generation”. Journal of The Royal Society Interface (2025).
• K Breuer, M Drela, XZ Fan, M Luca, “Design and performance of an ultra‑compact, low‑speed, low turbulence wind tunnel for aerodynamic and animal flight experiments”. Experiments in Fluids (2022).
• XZ Fan, S Swartz, and K Breuer, “Power Requirements for Flapping Flight With Heavy and Highly Articulated Wings”. Journal of The Royal Society Interface (2022).
• XZ Fan and K Breuer, “Low-Order Modeling of Flapping Flight with Highly Articulated, Cambered, Heavy Wings”. AIAA Journal (2021).
• S Sekhar, P Windes, XZ Fan, DK Tafti, “Canonical description of wing kinematics and dynamics for a straight flying insectivorous bat (Hipposideros pratti)”. PLOS One (2019).
• M Bender, L Tian, XZ Fan, A Kurdila, R Muller, “Spatially Recursive Estimation and Gaussian Process Dynamic Models of Bat Flapping Flight”. Nonlinear Dynamics (2019).
• P Windes, XZ Fan, M Bender, DK Tafti, R Müller, “A computational investigation of lift generation and power expenditure of Pratt’s roundleaf bat (Hipposideros pratti) in forward flight”. PLOS One (2018).

Peer-Reviewed Conference Proceedings

• XZ Fan, A Gehrke, K Breuer, “Wing twist and folding work in synergy to propel flapping wing animals and robots”. IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) (2024).
• H Vejdani, XZ Fan, K Breuer, “Robustness analysis of minimally-actuated flapping wing systems due to aerodynamic modeling uncertainty”. IEEE/ASME International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics (AIM) (2022).
• XZ Fan, K Breuer, H Vejdani, “Wing Fold and Twist Greatly Improves Flight Efficiency for Bat-Scale Flapping Wing Robots.” IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) (2021).

Patent

• XZ Fan and K Breuer. “A bio-inspired flapping wing/fin robotic platform”. U.S. Patent Application No. 12,441,468 (2025).

Education

• Brown University, Rhode Island, USA - Doctor of Philosophy (May 2023)
  Thesis: Bat-inspired flapping wing aerodynamics and robotics
  Advisor: Professor Kenneth Breuer

• Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Virginia, USA - Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering (Dec. 2017)
  Thesis: Bat flight aerodynamic simulation and its kinematics decomposition
  Advisor: Professor Danesh Tafti

• South China University of Technology (SCUT), Guangdong, China - Bachelor of Engineering in Mechanical Engineering and Automation (Jul. 2014)

Teaching and Mentoring Experience

• Mentor for Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships (SURF), Caltech (June – Aug. 2024)
  Mentee: Jacob Schuster
  • Fabrication and calibration of multi-hole probe air data system.
• Teaching Assistant at AI Bootcamp, Caltech (June 2024)
  Advisor: Dr. Reza Sadri
  • Organized course slides, hands-on sessions for reinforcement learning.
  • Presented ongoing work on implementing AI in flow sensing and flight control.

• Teaching Assistant, ENGN 0810 Fluid Mechanics (Aug. 2020 – Dec. 2020)
  Advisor: Prof. Roberto Zenit and Prof. Thomas Powers

• Teaching Assistant, ENGN 1340 Water Supply and Treatment Systems (Jan. 2020 – Jun. 2020)
  Advisor: Dr. Indrek Kulatos

Outreach

• 2024: Research featured in French documentary “Le rêve de Léonard, les secrets du vol dans la nature”
  Robotic platform, Flapperoo, featured in August issue of National Geographic magazine.
  • Invited talks at Pasadena City College PiDay and Pasadena PAL for local high school students.
• 2019 Summer: TA for Brown University Summer Pre-college Program for high school students.

Honors, Awards, and Scholarships

• 2021: Simon Ostrach Ph.D. ’50 Endowed Fellowship
• 2017 – 2018: Ingersoll-Rand Fellowship, Virginia Tech
• 2012 – 2013: Second Place Scholarship (Top 7 in class annual evaluation)
• 2013: Second Prize, School Challenge Cup; First Prize, Provincial Mechanical Innovative Design Competition
• 2010 – 2011: National Scholarship (Top 1 in class in annual evaluation); Second Prize, National Machine Drawing and CAD Design Competition