His current research interests are in following areas:

• Failure mechnics of advanced engineering materials (FEM, DEM, Machine learning)
• New composite materials/metamaterial with tailored mechanical properties 
• Multi-material jointing technologies for lightweighting

Analysis of engineering materials; Development of mechanical meta-materials;

Dr Xiaonan Hou is a senior lecturer in mechanical engineering at the University of Lancaster. He obtained his PhD at Loughborough University, UK (2006-2010) in the area of mechanics of advanced materials,  which was sponsored by both Loughborough University (UK) and NC State University (USA). After his PhD research, he joined The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (HK) and then The University of Warwick (UK) as a research fellow (2010-2016), when he started to work closely with world leading industry companies, such as Jaguar Land Rover, TATA Steel, EMS, Henkel, UnderArmor and Stratasys. The projects extensively include advanced engineering materials, vehicle lightweighting and metamaterial design.

On basis of his experience, Xiaonan has expertise in various advanced experimental and numerical methods to analyse mechanical properties of engineering materials under different loading conditions, such as static/dynamic testing systems, micro-CT system, optical image analysis system, FEM and DEM. Besides, he also has a wide knowledge in various manufacturing technologies: casting, injection moulding, adhesive jointing and rapid manufacturing.