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

Hoang Anh Nguyen, Kiarash Naghavi Khanghah, and Zhengkun Feng are selected for the PW-IASE Fellowship.

Dr. Hongyi Xu received the Connecticut Center for Advanced Technology (CCAT) Faculty Fellowship in Digital Transformation.

Ge and Kiarash’s work on LLM-enabled manufacturing process modeling has been selected to present in the MIT Manufacturing Week 2026Research Showcase, an event co-led by the MIT Initiative for New Manufacturing (INM) and the NSF I-Corps New England Hub.

Kiarash’s poster on LLM-assisted defect detection and classification won the 3rd place in the UConn ME research competition, 2.5+ years group. 

Our research and education efforts in harnessing structural stochasticity for architected material design are currently featured on UConn Today: https://today.uconn.edu/2026/04/uconn-engineering-professor-embraces-uncertainty-for-stronger-engineering-systems/.

Our join research with Rutgers on resilient cyber manufacturing system and LLM-assisted manufacturing process modeling was featured on technology.org and Metal Additive Manufacturing magazine:

https://www.technology.org/2025/11/29/engineers-develop-autonomous-artificial-intelligence-that-transforms-resilience-and-discovery-in-manufacturing/

https://www.metal-am.com/rutgers-led-ai-research-boosts-additive-manufacturing-in-extreme-environments/

Dr. Xu was appointed as an Associate Editor of ASME Journal of Mechanical Design on Oct 15, 2025.

According to Elsevier’s Data Repository, Dr. Xu is listed as one of the Top 2% Scientist in calendar year 2024 (single year). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000384

Our lab has the following awards and achievements at the 2025 ASME IDETC:

• Zihan (24′ PhD) won the ASME Design Automation Best Dissertation Award;
• Kiarash’s paper won the ASME Design for Manufacturing and the Life Cycle (DFMLC) Best Paper Award;
• Kiarash and Hoang Anh won the 1st place in the ASME Student Hackathon (Autodesk challenge);
• Zhengkun presented a paper on Explainable AI, and this work has also been accepted by Journal of Mechanical Design;
• Dr. Xu delivered a talk in the Computers and Information in Engineering (CIE) AI/ML panel.
• Hoang Anh also won the 2nd place in the Meme Challenge.

Our paper has been selected for the 2025 DFMLC Best Paper Award. This award will be formally presented to us at the upcoming ASME IDETC/CIE Conference.

Naghavi Khanghah, K., Chen, Z., Romeo, L., Yang, Q., Malhotra, R., Imani, F., Xu, H., “Multimodal RAG-Driven Anomaly Detection and Classification in Laser Powder Bed Fusion Using Large Language Models”, ASME 2025 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, (DETC2025-168615), American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 2025.