Dr Xu Fang

Dr. Fang received the Academic Award from the University of Southampton Student Union in 2019 for excellence in teaching.

Dr. Xu Fang earned his bachelor's degree in Materials Science and Engineering from Tsinghua University in 2004, followed by a Ph.D. in Condensed Matter Physics from the Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in 2009. Before joining Southampton in 2012, he held a three-year institutional research fellowship at RIKEN, Japan’s largest national research institute, where he also became fluent in Japanese.

Dr. Fang's research specialises in nanophotonics, with a particular focus on metasurfaces. His team employs advanced numerical simulations and nanofabrication techniques to achieve extreme light manipulation, exploring applications in optical sensing for the automotive industry and healthcare.

In metasurface research, his early work leverages coherent control [ACS Photonics 4, 3000-3011 (2017)] and includes the first demonstrations of metamaterial thin-film logic gates [Appl. Phys. Lett. 104, 141102 (2014); Light: Sci. Appl. 4, e292 (2015)] and excitation-selective spectroscopy [Phys. Rev. Appl. 5, 014010 (2016)].

More recently, his group has advanced multiple light manipulation techniques, including:

• Continuous beam steering [Opt. Express 28, 30107 (2020); Opt. Express 28, 38949 (2020); JOSAB 43, 344 (2026)]
• Tuneable metalenses for dynamic light focusing [Opt. Express 30 27683 (2022)]
• THz sensing [Opt. Express 29, 21749 (2021); Opt. Express 30, 12080 (2022); Adv. Opt. Mater. 14, 71328 (2026) (featured on the journal cover in the August 2026 issue)]
• Mimicking quantum behaviours with classical optics [Adv. Opt. Mater. 12, 2301979 (2024)]
• Shaping the light emission from a photonic chip [Opt. Express 31, 15876 (2023)]
• Topologically structured light generation for novel sensing [APL Photonics 5, 076102 (2020); Opt. Express 30, 7342 (2022); Photonics Res. 11, 1542 (2023); Opt. Express 31, 42549 (2023)]

Dr. Fang served on program committees for international conferences such as CLEO and OPIC, and regularly reviews for leading journals, including Nature Communications, Advanced Materials, Advanced Optical Materials, and Laser & Photonics Reviews. He has been awarded six grants from the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, the Royal Society, the Leverhulme Trust, and the EPSRC as the Principal Investigator. He held Visiting Scholar positions at the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology (TUAT) in 2024 and at MIT in 2025. His group has also welcomed both short-term and long-term visiting students from TUAT, Okayama University, Tsinghua University, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and MIT.

Research Group

Current members: Hao Peng, Yuntian Ye, Junyu Wu (co-supervised), Simon Coolsaet, Margot Langlet-Odienne (University of Lorraine, France), Zixuan Wang (Research Fellow), Samuel Stephens

Visitors: Aramis Subee (MIT, USA), Ella Richards (MIT, USA), Mahiro Horikawa (TUAT, Japan), Kaito Miwa (TUAT, Japan), Dr. Jiaming Liu (Tsinghua Univ., China), Dr. Ziwei Liu (CAS, China), Sarasa Notsu (Okayama University, Japan)

Graduated students: Dr. Moise Sotto (co-supervised), Dr. Fei He, Dr. James Frame, Dr. Hailong Pi (co-supervised), Dr. Shengqi Yin, Dr. Ben Rowlinson (co-supervised), Dr. Jianzhi Huang, Dr. Siyu Chen, Dr. Zihang Zheng, Dr. Yuxin Du