RCTFF Director

Professor Jintu Fan is currently Lee family Professor in Textiles Technology and Chair Professor of Fiber Science and Apparel Engineering at School of Fashion and textiles, Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU). Professor Fan is a Former Head of Institute of Textiles and Clothing at PolyU and Former Department Chair and Vincent VC Woo Professor in Fiber Science and Apparel Design at Cornell University. He first  joined PolyU in 1996 as Assistant Professor, was promoted to Associate Professor in 2001 and then to Professor in 2005. He left PolyU in 2012 and joined the Department of Fiber Science and Apparel Design at the College of Human Ecology in Cornell University, USA as Department Chair and Vincent V. C. Woo Professor in Fiber Science and Apparel Design. During his tenure with Cornell University, he orchestrated the establishment of the Cornell Institute of Fashion & Fiber Innovation and is the founding Director of the institute. Prof. Fan returned to PolyU to become Head of Institute of Textiles and Clothing (ITC) in 2018 and remained at this position until ITC was upgraded to School of Fashion and Textiles in 2022. 

Professor Fan is internationally renowned in the field of fashion and textiles. His research focuses on improving understanding of the interactions among the human body, clothing and environment, and on that basis, developing fibrous materials and fashionable clothing with enhanced functional performance. His work is multi-disciplinary and involves instrumentation, computational modeling, biomimetics, nanotechnology as well as psychology. He has won numerous competitive research grants and authored/co-authored about 300 SCI/EI refereed journal papers, many of which have appeared in leading journals of relevant fields, including Science Advances, Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, Advanced Materials, Advanced Functional Materials, Nano Letters, Soft Matter, Langmuir, International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer, and Textile Research Journal.

In recognition of his outstanding contributions, Professor Fan has been honoured with a number of prestigious awards, including:

Warner Memorial Medal from The Textile Institute, 2016.
Morgan Sesquicentennial Fellow from Cornell University.
Honorary Fellow of The Textile Institute, 2010 (the highest honour within the institute for creativity and advancement of knowledge).
Gold Medal Award - 32nd International Exhibition of Inventions of Geneva, 2004.
Distinguished Achievement Award from the US-based international Fiber Society, 2003.
Professor Fan has a prominent international standing in the field of fashion and textiles. He served as President of the US based international Fiber Society in 2018, Director of the Shanghai International Fashion Innovation Center from 2016 to 2019 and Chairman of Hong Kong Institution of Textiles and Apparel (HKITA) from 2019-2022.

• Bachelor of Engineering, East China Institute of Textile Science and Technology
• Doctor of Philosophy, The University of Leeds

• Fellow of the Textile Institute