FacultyNews
Zhang Wins Young Investigator Award Grant Will Support More Automatic, Robust Ship Design
Jessica Zhang
Assistant Professor Yongjie (Jessica) Zhang has received a prestigious Young Investigator Award from the Department of Defense’s Office of Naval Research (ONR) for her efforts to create new
simulation tools for ship design and analysis. Her proposal, titled “Automatic and Robust All-Hexahedral Mesh Generation From B-Reps With Sharp Feature Preservation,” was one of only 17 chosen for Young Investigator funding, from more than 200 submissions. Founded in 1985 by the ONR—which provides the science and
technology necessary to maintain the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps’s technological advantage—the Young Investigator program seeks to attract outstanding professors at higher education institutions to the Navy’s research program, in order to support their work and encour- age their teaching and research careers. Young Investigator winners must have obtained a doctorate or
equivalent degree within the past five years and show exceptional promise for conducting innovative research. The award includes a three-year research grant of $510,000. Applicants are selected by ONR based on several criteria, including past performance, publications, professional activities, and honors and awards.
Achieving Better Ship Design
Through Simulation Zhang’s award will help her develop novel algorithms and a software package that will enable automatic, robust, accurate, and efficient engineering simulations of ship stability and performance. By testing and verifying design ideas in a virtual environment, Zhang will not only help create improved ship designs, but will streamline the entire design- through-analysis product development lifecycle for the Navy. Her results will significantly improve the capability of early- design evaluations, as well as
complex analyses, for a variety of applications in Naval research, including vibration, acoustics, and shock analyses. “Currently, there are no engineering
simulation tools used to automatically test the product performance of the Navy’s highly tech- nical ship structures,” says Zhang. “My goal is to develop simulation tools, including specially designed geometric modeling and meshing formulas, that will help in the construction and modeling of complex structures like ships and
submarines.” This project complements Zhang’s existing computational
modeling research, which focuses on computational geometry, computer graphics, visualization, and finite element analysis—as well as the applications of these capabilities in computational biomedicine and engineering. Zhang leads the Computational Biomodeling Lab at MechE, where she and her students are developing new algo- rithms for biomodeling at the molecular, cellular, tissue, and organ scales to explore applications in a variety of engineering fields. “I am honored and extremely excited about this
wonderful award because it gives me additional research resources and exposure to some challenging
real-world problems,” says Zhang. Zhang received a B.E. degree in Automotive
Engineering and an M.E. degree in Engineering Mechanics from Tsinghua University in China. She then earned an M.E. in Aerospace Engineer- ing and Engineering Mechanics, and a Ph.D. in Computational Engineering and Science, from the University of Texas at Austin. Zhang joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon in 2007, and she also holds
a courtesy appointment in the Department of Biomedical Engineering.
“We are extremely proud of Jessica’s ongoing dedication to excellence and congratulate her on this well-deserved recognition,” says Professor Nadine Aubry, MechE’s Department Head. “We wish her the best on the research she will conduct under this prestigious award.”•
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