Dr. Xu is appointed as the Pratt & Whitney Associate Professor in Advanced Systems Engineering (2026 – 2029). This Associate Professorship was established by an endowment from Raytheon Technologies Corporation as part of a major investment at UConn to advanced systems engineering. This professorship supports multiple Associate Professors who are nationally or internationally recognized researchers, scholars and teachers, and who will have made significant contributions to the field of advanced systems engineering.

In summer 2026, Dr. Xu delivered three invited talks covering topics in resilient digital manufacturing systems and architected material design:

• JMD Future of Design Panel, in ASME IDETC/CIE 2026, Aug, 2026
• GE Aerospace Research, Jul, 2026
• Ford Motor Company – Research and Advanced Engineering, June, 2026

In addition, Dr. Xu’s group also presented two papers in ASME IDETC/CIE 2026:

• DETC2026-191528 Physics-distilled Neural Network with Large Language Models for Process-Property Mapping in Manufacturing Processes
• DETC2026-194385 Explainable Feature-Steered Diffusion for Nature-Inspired Periodic Metamaterial Design From Stochastic Microstructures