Carnegie Mellon's Jessica Zhang wins Investigator Award

Carnegie Mellon University's Yongjie (Jessica) Zhang was awarded a prestigious Young Investigator Award of $510,000 for the next three years from the Office of Naval Research for research excellence.

"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,''said Zhang, an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon.

Zhang, one of 17 award recipients nationwide, was selected by the Department of Defense's Office of Naval Research for the 2010 Young Investigators Program, which invests in new faculty members at institutions of higher education who show exceptional promise for creative study.

The Department of Defense's Office of Naval Research provides the science and technology necessary to maintain the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps's technological advantage.

Zhang will use her grant funds to develop a novel algorithms and a software package designed to help improve and streamline ship design and analysis for the Navy. The research results will significantly improve the capability of early-design evaluations as well as complex analyses for a range of physics and applications in DOD/Navy research, such as vibration, acoustics and shock analysis.

"We want to develop tools and specially-designed geometric modeling and mesh formulas that will help in the construction and modeling of complex structures like Naval ships and submarines,'' said Zhang. At present, there are no simulation systems in use for automatically testing the product performance for some of these highly technical ship structures, according to Zhang.

"This is a wonderful award for an innovative and hardworking researcher, and we are extremely proud of Jessica's ongoing dedication to excellence,'' said Nadine Aubry, head of Carnegie Mellon's Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Zhang received her undergraduate degree in engineering in 1996 at Tsinghua University in China, a master's in solid mechanics engineering in 2002 and a Ph.D. in computational engineering and science in 2005, both from the University of Texas at Austin.

Provided by Carnegie Mellon University