Dr. Xiaoping Du

Dr. Xiaoping Du, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Missouri University of Science and Technology, has been named Curators’ Distinguished Teaching Professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Missouri S&T. Du will be officially recognized during Missouri S&T’s commencement ceremonies on Saturday, Dec. 17.

The Curators’ Distinguished Teaching Professorship was established in 1990 to honor outstanding professors, call attention to teaching excellence, and foster improvements in teaching and learning. Du teaches introduction to engineering design, dynamics and probabilistic engineering design.

Du joined the Missouri S&T faculty in 2002 as an assistant professor of mechanical engineering. He was promoted to associate professor in 2008 and to full professor in 2014. During his tenure at Missouri S&T, Du has received numerous awards for excellence in teaching.

His research interests include reliability-based design, robust design, multidisciplinary optimization design under uncertainty, and probabilistic and statistical methods.

Before joining the Missouri S&T faculty, Du held positions at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Iowa and China Southwest Petroleum Institute. He also worked as a senior design engineer at Mechatronics in Michigan.

Du is a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the International Society of Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization and the American Society of Engineering Education. He serves as associate editor for the Journal of Mechanical Design, review editor of Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization, and a member of the editorial boards of three other professional journals.

Du earned a bachelor of science degree from Shanghai Jiaotong University in 1985, a master of science degree from Chongqing University in 1992 and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2002, all in mechanical engineering.