Charbel Farhat


Charbel Farhat is the Vivian Church Hoff Professor of Aircraft Structures in the School of Engineering at Stanford University, where he is also Chairman of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Professor in the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering, and Director of the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology Center of Excellence for Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford. He also serves on the Space Technology Industry-Government-University Roundtable.
Farhat has received numerous awards and academic distinctions for his lasting contributions to aeroelasticity, CFD on moving grids, computational acoustics, computational mechanics, high performance computing, and model order reduction. He is listed as an ISI Highly Cited Author in Engineering by the ISI Web of Knowledge, Thomson Scientific Company.
From 2007 to 2018, he served as the Director of the Army High Performance Computing Research Center at Stanford University, and from 2015 to 2018, on the United States Air Force Scientific Advisory Board. He has previously served on the technical assessment boards of several national and international research councils and foundations, and on the United States Bureau of Industry and Security's Emerging Technology and Research Advisory Committee at the United States Department of Commerce.
He is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Member of the Royal Academy of Engineering, 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, and a Fellow of six international professional societies: the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the World Innovation Foundation, the International Association of Computational Mechanics, the US Association of Computational Mechanics, and the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics. He is also an Editor of the International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering, and the International Journal for Numerical Methods in Fluids.

Career

Farhat began his career at the University of Colorado at Boulder where he served as Chairman of the Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences and Director of the Center for Aerospace Structures. He then moved to Stanford University where he occupies the Vivian Church Hoff Chair of Engineering, serves as Chairman of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Director of the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology Center of Excellence for Aeronautics and Astronautics, and served for 11 years as the Director of the Army High Performance Computing Research Center.
He is the developer of the Finite Element Tearing and Interconnecting method for the scalable solution of large-scale systems of equations on massively parallel processors. FETI was incorporated in several finite element production and commercial software in the US and Europe. It enabled the Sandia National Laboratories’ structural dynamics code SALINAS to win a Gordon Bell Prize in the special accomplishment category based on innovation.
Farhat also developed the three-field computational framework for coupled nonlinear fluid-structure interaction problems. With his co-workers, he introduced the concept of a Discrete Geometric Conservation Law and established its relationship to the nonlinear stability of CFD schemes on moving grids. This led to the development of the nonlinear aeroelastic software AERO that is used for many applications ranging from the shape sensitivity analysis of Formula 1 cars, to the nonlinear flutter analysis of supersonic business jet concepts.

Research monographs