Welcome to my personal website!
- I am an Assistant Professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC), starting in January 2025. My research group is recruiting graduate students and postdocs for Fall 2025. Prospective candidates may email me (rui.ray.xu@usc.edu) with your CV and research interests.
- My research mission is to advance sustainable and high-speed aerospace propulsion and enable clean energy transitions. My core research is to tackle two challenges in the aerospace frontier: aerospace sustainability and high-speed aerospace vehicle design. I am particularly interested in understainding sustainable aviation fuel combustion, emission, and their synthetic production pathways, along with the underlying reacting flow physics in both current aerospace propulsion devices and future carbon-neutral, high-speed vehicles. Beyond the core research mission, I am also interested in applying fast quantum chemistry for materials computation to enable future sustainable energy materials design.
- My research approach centers around multiscale reacting flow modeling, integrating computations such as fast quantum chemistry computation, chemical kinetic modeling, and turbulence-resolved flow simulations, with the aid of machine learning and data-driven methods. For details, please visit my research page.
Professional Education
- Postdoc, Stanford University and SLAC National Laboratory, Theoretical Chemistry (2024)
- Ph.D., Stanford University, Mechanical Engineering (2019)
- M.S., Northwestern University, Mechanical Engineering (2014)
- B.S., Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Mechanical Engineering (2012)
Recent News
Visit complete news archive here
- 02/19/25: My co-authored paper "Ultrafast events in electrocyclic ring-opening reactions" is now published in Annual Review in Physical Chemistry.
- 01/06/25: I attended AIAA SciTech in Orlando, FL.
- 01/01/25: I joined USC as an Assistant Professor in Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering. The Xu SACE Research Group is launched!
- 09/11/24: I attended North American Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) Conference and Expo in Saint Paul, MN.
- 08/02/24: I attended Emerging Frontiers in Computational Chemistry and Materials: A Symposium in Celebration of Emily Carter's Achievements in Pacific Grove, CA.