People

Faculty

Dr. Eric Jing Du

Steve and Wendy Blum Professor
UF Research Foundation Professor
University of Florida | 460F Weil Hall, Gainesville, FL 32611
Email: eric.du@essie.ufl.edu | Curriculum Vitae

Dr. Eric Jing Du is a Professor with Steve and Wendy Blum Endowed Professorship and UF Research Foundation Endowed Professorship in the Department of Civil and Coastal Engineering, and affiliate and graduate professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and Department of Industrial and System Engineering, Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering at University of Florida. Before joining University of Florida in January 2019, he was a faculty member at Texas A&M University (2015-2018) and University of Texas at San Antonio (2013-2015). He has also worked in the industry as a senior data analyst at Zachry Industrial for three years. Dr. Du’s research centers on embodied AI for human-robot collaboration in complex, real-world operations, with a particular emphasis on unstructured environments. His work integrates multimodal sensing, semantic perception, and human factors to enable intelligent, adaptive interaction between humans and robotic systems. His ongoing projects leverage mixed reality, haptic interfaces, and data-driven models to enhance situational awareness, physical embodiment, and decision-making in teleoperation and collaborative robotics. With his colleagues, Dr.Du has secured more than $12 million in federal funding from National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), with more than $6 million directly attributed to him. Dr. Du has published more than 200 referred journal and conference papers, including several best paper awards from high impact journals. Dr.Du is the elected Chair of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Visualization, Information Modeling and Simulation (VIMS) committee, and serves on the editorial board of several journals. Dr.Du received his PhD degree in construction engineering from Michigan State University (2012), master’s degree in Enterprise Management (2007) and bachelor degree in Civil Engineering (2004), both from Tianjin University in China.

Post-Doctoral Associates

Photo of Fang Xu

Fang Xu, PhD
PhD in Civil Engineering (2024). M.S. from UF.
Research: Augmented reality (AR) systems, robotics, AI Agents.
Email: xufang@ufl.edu

Ph.D. Students

Thanakon Uthai
Ph.D. Candidate in Civil Engineering. B.E. and M.E. from Chulalongkorn University, Thailand. Research: Soft object manipulation and imitation learning in robotics.
Email: thanakon.uthai@ufl.edu

Bowen Sun
Ph.D. Candidate in Civil Engineering. M.S. from Carnegie Mellon University; B.E. from Chongqing University. Research: AI Cognition and human-AI alignment.
Email: bowensun@ufl.edu

Zhen “Jennifer” Zhang
Ph.D. Student in Civil Engineering. M.S. in Computer Science from University of Wisconsin-Madison; B.S. from Central South University. Research: Time series analysis with deep learning for nonlinear optimization.
Email: zzhang4@ufl.edu

Xianyao Li
Ph.D. Student in Civil Engineering. M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Florida. Research: Embodied Artificial Intelligence, Robot Navigation.
Email: xianyao.li@ufl.edu

Ruitong Tian
Ph.D. Student in Civil Engineering. M.S. from National University of Singapore (2025); B.E. from South China University of Technology. Research: Robotic in-hand manipulation, VLA.
Email: ruitongtian@ufl.edu

Rui Min
Ph.D. Student in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. M.S. from Northeastern University. Research: Embodied AI, deep reinforcement learning (DRL), and LLMs.
Email: rmin@ufl.edu

Zeyu Wang
Ph.D. Student in Civil Engineering. M.S. from University of Southern California; Level II Automation Engineer at Nucor Steel Berkeley. Focus: Steel mill automation systems and adaptive process setup modeling.
Email: zeyu.wang1@uf.edu

Yang Lyu
Ph.D. Student in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. M.S. from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Research: Robotics, control systems, mobile manipulation, and embodied AI.
Email: lyuyang@ufl.edu

Jinjia Guo
Ph.D. Student in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. M.S. from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Research: Robotics, embodied AI, and dexterous manipulation.
Email: jinjiaguo@ufl.edu