Shih-Chi Chen is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He completed a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan in 1999, then master's (2003) and doctoral (2007) degrees in mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After his doctorate he held a post-doctoral fellowship at the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at Harvard Medical School, working on biomedical optics and endomicroscopy, and from 2009 to 2011 was a senior scientist at Nano Terra, a start-up founded by the Harvard chemist George Whitesides, where he developed precision instruments for novel nanofabrication processes. He joined CUHK in 2011 and was promoted to Professor in 2020. His research covers ultrafast laser applications, biomedical optics, precision engineering and nanomanufacturing, from laser processing to the control of precision at micro and nanometre scales. He is a member of the American Society for Precision Engineering, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, SPIE and the Optical Society, and has received the R&D 100 Award twice — in 2003 for a six-axis nanopositioner and in 2018 for an ultrafast nanoscale three-dimensional printer.
Chen has turned ultrafast lasers from a laboratory tool into a platform for precision manufacturing and biomedical imaging: the nanoscale 3D printing and laser-processing techniques developed at CUHK reach from micro-device fabrication to endomicroscopy, and his two R&D 100 Awards reflect the practical impact of that instrument work.
Achievements
- 2007 · Completed a PhD in mechanical engineering at MIT.
- 2011 · Joined the Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering at CUHK.
- 2018 · Received an R&D 100 Award for an ultrafast nanoscale 3D printer.