C. Shan Xu, PhD

C. Shan Xu is a graduate of the University of Science and Technology of China and earned his Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1997. He was a technical director in charge of research, development, and dissemination of advanced semiconductor technologies at Lam Research Corporation. In 2009, he joined the Janelia Research Campus of Howard Hughes Medical Institute to develop enhanced focused ion beam-scanning electron microscopy (FIB-SEM) and later became the founding director of FIB-SEM technologies. In 2022, he joined Yale School of Medicine as a Harvey and Kate Cushing Professor in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Physiology.

A pioneer in instrumentation development, he holds more than twenty patents and is known for his work transforming conventional FIB-SEM from a lab tool that is unreliable for more than a few days to a robust imaging platform with 100% effective reliability: capable of years of continuous imaging without defects in the final image stack. The enhanced FIB-SEM technology has enabled significant discoveries in tissue biology, cell biology, and neuroscience where nano-scale resolution coupled with meso and even macro scale volumes is critical. It enabled the largest and most detailed brain connectome to date, and created the first open-access, 3D atlas of whole cells and tissues at the finest isotropic resolution of 4-nm voxels, including cancer and immune cells, mouse pancreatic islets, and Drosophila neural tissues. The story was featured in Nature and TheScientist. In addition to technology development, he is well known for his leadership in pioneering enhanced FIB-SEM technology and disseminating it to worldwide research community.

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Positions available: PhD students, Postdocs, and Scientists.

Please contact us to discuss your interest and vision.

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