Zhang among 4 faculty honored with 2025 Campus Distinguished Promotion

University of Illinois Provost John Coleman has selected the 2025 Campus Distinguished Promotion Award recipients, including Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) Assistant Professor and David C. Crawford Faculty Scholar Shelly Zhang. Zhang will be promoted to associate professor in August 2025 pending approval by the Board of Trustees.

During its annual promotion review process, the Campus Committee on Promotion and Tenure identifies exceptional cases of scholars whose contributions have been extraordinary in terms of quality of work and overall achievement. A total of 9 scholars across each level of tenured faculty promotion (associate professor and full professor) were selected to receive Campus Distinguished Promotion Awards in 2025. Each awardee receives a discretionary fund to support their scholarly activities.

Zhang was recognized for her stellar achievements by the provost, and was among only four associate professors to receive this honor. 

Over the past year, Zhang's accolades have been growing, receiving the 2025 Haftka Young Investigator Award from the International Society for Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization (ISSMO) and the Henry Hess Early Career Publication Award from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) in May 2025. In January 2025, Zhang was selected as the recipient of the 2025 ASME Thomas J. R. Hughes Young Investigator Award  for special achievements in applied mechanics.

Zhang also received recognition in 2024 as an outstanding young investigator including the EMI Leonardo da Vinci Award from the Engineering Mechanics Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) for engineers early in their careers who have made promising ground-breaking developments in the field of Engineering Mechanics and Mechanical Sciences. She was again recognized for her research and as a top performer in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency  (DARPA) Young Faculty Award pool, receiving the selective DARPA Director's Fellowship Award. 

Additionally, in November 2024 Zhang was awarded a grant by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support her work in metamaterials optimization. This project is a collaboration with Professor Stefano Gonella from the University of Minnesota; it aims to understand and design a new class of topological metamaterials with special surface and wave properties that can be programmed to display various levels of softness and rigidity, allowing them to manage intelligently the loads/impact applied by the outside environment.

An alumna of CEE at Illinois (BS '12, MS '14), Zhang joined The Grainger College of Engineering as a CEE faculty member in 2018. She is also affiliated with the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Her research interests are in the general areas of topology optimization, stochastic programming, machine learning, multi-scale metamaterials, additive manufacturing and 3D/4D printing. She directs the MISSION Laboratory (MultI-functional Structures and Systems desIgn OptimizatioN), which focuses on exploring topology optimization, stochastic programming, and additive manufacturing to develop multi-functional, resilient, sustainable, and innovative engineering infrastructure and materials for applications at different scales, from as large as high-rise buildings to as small as material microstructures.