Assistant Professor X. Shelly Zhang has won the 2024 EMI Leonardo da Vinci Award from the Engineering Mechanics Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers.
The award recognizes outstanding young investigators early in their careers for promising ground-breaking developments in the field of Engineering Mechanics and Mechanical Sciences. Zhang was cited “for important contributions to novel multi-physics topology optimization methods and fabrication strategies for highly multi-functional structures with programmable behaviors, and for translating practice.”
Zhang earned a B.S. (2012) in Civil Engineering and M.S. (2014) in Structural Engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a Ph.D. (2018) in Structural Engineering from Georgia Tech. She joined the CEE at Illinois faculty in 2019, where her research interests are in the general areas of topology optimization, programmable multi-functional metamaterials, additive manufacturing, data-driven models, multi-scale materials and structures, and 3D/4D printing. She directs the MISSION Laboratory (MultI-functional Structures and Systems desIgn OptimizatioN).