Professor
Center of Excellence for Aeronautics and Astronautics
Dr. Charbel Farhat is the Vivian Church Hoff Professor of Aircraft Structures, Chairman of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He is also Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Professor in the Institute of Computational and Mathematical Engineering, Director of the Army High Performance Computing Research Center, and Director of the King Abdulaziz City of Science and Technology Center of Excellence for Aeronautics and Astronautics. He currently serves on the United States Bureau of Industry and Security's Emerging Technology and Research Advisory Committee (ETRAC) at the United States Department of Commerce, on the United States Air Force Scientific Advisory Board (SAB), and on the Space Technology Industry-Government-University Roundtable. He was designated by the US Navy recruiters as a Primary Key-Influencer and flew with the Blue Angels during Fleet Week 2014. Prof. Farhat is Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering, and Editor of the International Journal for Numerical Methods in Fluids. He also serves on the editorial boards of ten other international scientific journals.
He is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Member of the Royal Academy of Engineering (UK), a Member of the Lebanese Academy of Sciences, a Docteur Honoris Causa of Ecole Normale Superieure Paris-Saclay, a Docteur Honoris Causa of Ecole Centrale de Nantes, a designated ISI Highly Cited Author in Engineering, and a Fellow of six professional societies: the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), the International Association of Computational Mechanics (IACM), the World Innovation Foundation (WIF), the United States Association of Computational Mechanics (USACM), and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). He was knighted by the Prime Minister of France in the Order of Academic Palms and awarded the Medal of Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Academiques. He is also the recipient of several other professional and academic distinctions including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the ASME's Computers & Information in Engineering Division, the Spirit of St Louis Medal from the ASME’s Aerospace Division, the Ashley Award for Aeroelasticity and the Structures, Structural Dynamics and Materials Award from the AIAA, the Gordon Bell Prize and Sidney Fernbach Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Computer Society, the John von Neumann Medal from the USACM, the Grand Prize from the Japan Society for Computational Engineering and Science (JSCES), and the Gauss-Newton Medal from the IACM. He is also Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering, Editor of the International Journal for Numerical Methods in Fluids, and a member of the editorial boards of nine other international scientific journals. He has been an AGARD lecturer on aeroelasticity and computational mechanics at several distinguished European institutions, and a plenary or keynote speaker at numerous national and international scientific meetings. He is the author of over 400 refereed journal publications on fluid-structure interaction, computational fluid dynamics on moving grids, computational structural mechanics, computational acoustics, supercomputing, parallel processing, and model order reduction.
Prof. Farhat and his Research Group (FRG) develop mathematical models, advanced computational algorithms, and high-performance software for the design and analysis of complex systems in aerospace, marine, mechanical, and naval engineering. They contribute major advances to Simulation-Based Engineering Science. Current engineering foci in research are on the nonlinear aeroelasticity and flight dynamics of Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) with flexible flapping wings and N+3 aircraft with High Aspect Ratio (HAR) wings, layout optimization and additive manufacturing of wing structures, supersonic inflatable aerodynamic decelerators for Mars landing, and underwater acoustics. Current theoretical and computational emphases in research are on high-performance, multi-scale modeling for the high-fidelity analysis of multi-physics problems, high-order embedded boundary methods, uncertainty quantification, and efficient model-order reduction for time-critical applications such as design and active control.