CHENG-HAU YANG
Postdoctoral Appointee
Biography
Dr. Cheng-Hau Yang is a postdoctoral researcher at Argonne National Laboratory, where he develops scalable numerical frameworks for multiphysics simulations under the supervision of Dr. Gary Hu and Dr. Mark Messner. He is the 36th Robert J. Melosh Medal recipient and has extensive experience building multiphysics finite-element frameworks for solving partial differential equations (PDEs), with contributions to MOOSE/libMesh, deal.II, and Dendro.
At Argonne, Dr. Yang is advancing the Shifted Cohesive Zone Method (SCZM) and enhancing welding simulations by improving robustness and usability, including new strategies for generating physically consistent initial guesses through patch-recovery approaches.
Dr. Yang earned his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Iowa State University, under the advisement of Dr. Baskar Ganapathysubramanian and Dr. Adarsh Krishnamurthy. His doctoral research focused on advanced numerical methods -- including the Shifted Boundary Method (SBM), in collaboration with Dr. Guglielmo Scovazzi, and the Finite Cell Method (FCM) -- for solving PDEs on irregular domains, improving accuracy, robustness, and scalability across a wide range of engineering applications.
During his Ph.D., Dr. Yang completed a research residency at Google X, where he worked on parallel parasitic-extraction simulations using DEAL.II under the supervision of Dr. Dino Ruić. There, he developed a remeshing-free circuit-geometry optimization technique that reduced runtime by 50% per iteration and enhanced software usability through configuration file support and automated testing with GoogleTest.