Chen Shih-Chi is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He received his B.S. degree in Power Mechanical Engineering from the Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, in 1999; and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, U.S., in 2003 and 2007, respectively. Following his graduate work, he entered a post-doctoral fellowship in the Wellman Center for Photomedicine, Harvard Medical School, where his research focused on biomedical optics and endomicroscopy. From 2009 to 2011, he joined Nano Terra, Inc., a Harvard University start-up company founded by Prof. George Whitesides, to develop precision instruments for novel nanofabrication processes. He joined CUHK in 2011, where his primary research interests include nanomanufacturing, ultrafast laser applications, biophotonics, and precision engineering. Prof. Chen is presently a Fellow of Optica, Fellow of SPIE, Fellow of ASME, Fellow of HKIE, and member of ASHK.
Advanced manufacturing represents the pinnacle in the application of engineering innovation. Advances in manufacturing technologies often substantially lower the manufacturing cost over conventional methods or provide new solutions to fabricate structures or devices that cannot be made in the past, and accordingly result in new technologies and businesses. In this regard, Prof. Chen has significantly advanced the envelope of photo-polymerization-based micro-additive manufacturing processes. By exploiting the effect of spatial and temporal focusing as well as digital holography, Prof. Chen developed a suite of ground-breaking methods to parallelize the 3D printing process, which simultaneously set records on the printing rate (466 mm3/hour), resolution (20 – 100 nm), and yield with a 95% cost reduction. His recent effort further expands the high-speed printing process to a wide range of materials, including metals, alloys, semiconductors, ceramics, polymers, and bio-materials through self-assembly without compromising resolution. These methods provide a mean to mass-produce functional micro- and nanostructures such as mechanical and optical metamaterials, micro-optics, bio-scaffolds, electrochemical interfaces, and flexible electronics, which may play a large role in fields such as electric transportation, healthcare, clean energy and water, computing, and telecommunications. The 3D nanofabrication solution has recently been commercialized by Astra Optics Limited, a venture-backed CUHK spin-off company that focuses on manufacturing high-precision optical components, ranging from microlens arrays, diffractive optical elements, distal-end optics in microendoscopy, and virtual reality devices, to molds of cell phone lenses.