Dr. Xiaoping Du

Dr. Xiaoping Du, Curators’ Distinguished Teaching Professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Missouri University of Science and Technology, has won the 2017 Governor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Each year, the Governor’s Award is presented to one faculty member at each public institution of higher education in Missouri. This year’s recipients were honored during an April 7 luncheon hosted by Gov. Eric Greitens in Jefferson City, Missouri.

The awards, which are not monetary, are based on effective teaching, innovating course design and delivery, effective advising, service to the university community, commitment to high standards of excellence and success in nurturing student achievement.

Du teaches introduction to engineering design, dynamics and probabilistic engineering design at Missouri S&T. He joined the 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. In 2016, Du was named Curators’ Distinguished Teaching Professor. During his tenure at Missouri S&T, he has received numerous awards for excellence in teaching.

Du’s 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 Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and a member of 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 and for IISE Transactions, as review editor of Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization, and as 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.