Team

REU Site Faculty Mentors

REU participants will work directly with faculty at WSU Vancouver and UHCL.

Xuechen Zhang (PI)
Computer Science

Dr. Zhang is an Associate Professor in the School of Engineering and Computer Science and director of the Intelligent Storage System Lab at WSU. He earned his PhD in Computer Engineering from Wayne State University. Before joining WSU in Fall of 2015, he was a postdoctoral research associate at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a research scientist at the University of Oregon. His current research on file and storage system systems and high-performance computing is funded by NSF, DOE, DOT, and Amazon.
Xiaokun Yang (Co-PI)
Computer Science

Dr. Xiaokun Yang is an Associate Professor in the College of Science and Engineering at the University of Houston Clear Lake. He is also an Affiliate Faculty member in the Computer Science Department at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Dr. Yang completed his Ph.D. in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Florida International University (FIU), USA in Spring 2016.  From 2007 to 2012, Dr. Yang worked as a Senior ASIC Design and Verification Engineer at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and China Electronic Corporation (CEC). His research interests primarily revolve around Hardware Acceleration for Future High-Performance Computing (HPC), ASIC/FPGA/SoC Design and Verification, and High-Performance SoC Architecture.

Xinghui Zhao (Director of ENCS)
Computer Science

Dr. Xinghui Zhao is the Director of the School of Engineering and Computer Science at Washington State University Vancouver. She joined WSU Vancouver in 2012, and previously received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Saskatchewan in Canada. Dr. Zhao has extensive experience in conducting research in parallel and distributed systems, machine learning, and big data computing. She is particularly interested in interdisciplinary research projects which leverage cutting-edge machine learning and AI technologies to solve large-scale, real-world problems. Dr. Zhao’s research is sponsored by federal funding agencies, foundations, and industry, including NSF, DOE, DOT, BPA, Oregon Best, Microsoft, Amazon, Intel, etc. She has also been serving in chair roles to organize international conferences, such as IEEE Cluster, IEEE/ACM Utility and Cloud Computing (UCC), and IEEE/ACM Big Data Computing, Applications and Technologies (BDCAT). 
Scott Wallace
Computer Science


Hua Tan
Mechanical Engineering

Dr. Hua Tan is an associate professor in School of Engineering and Computer Science at Washington State University (WSU). His current research interests include capillary flows, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Inkjet-based Additive Manufacturing, and High-Performance Computation. His research has been funded by government agencies (NSF, JCATI of WA) and several companies (FujiFilm, Xaar, FTI) since 2016. He obtained Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2010, and both master’s and bachelor’s Degrees from Wuhan University of Technology, China. Prior to joining WSU, he had been working as an R&D engineer in the printing group of Hewlett-Packard (HP) Company from 2010 to 2015, where he had been involved with a large variety of research projects in microfluidics and 3D printing. He has published more than 80 research papers, 2 book chapters, and 4 US patents. He served as a session Chair of several professional conferences such as ASME IMECE, InterPore, APS-DFD. He serves as a peer reviewer for academic journals and funding agencies.

Xiaolin Chen
Mechanical Engineering


Dr. Chen is an Associate Professor in the School of Engineering and Computer Science and director of the computer-aided Engineering Lab at WSU. She received her PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Cincinnati and her MS and BS degrees both from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Her current research is focused on Multiphysics modeling with applications for biomedical engineering, with a particular focus on circulating tumor cell separation in microfluidic lab-on-a-chip platforms.

Chris Qin
Mechanical Engineering