Rate My Professor Charbel Farhat

Charbel Farhat is the Vivian Church Hoff Professor of Aircraft Structures in the School of Engineering at Stanford University, and also serves as Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Professor by courtesy of Mechanical Engineering, and Professor in the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering. He holds a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley (1987), M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (1986), Structural Engineering and Structural Mechanics (1984) from Berkeley, Applied Mechanics from Université de Paris VI (1983), and a Diplôme d'Ingénieur from École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures, France (1983). Before joining Stanford in 2004 as Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Farhat was on the faculty at the University of Colorado at Boulder from 1987 to 2004, advancing from Assistant Professor to Professor and Chairman of the Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences. At Stanford, he chaired the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics from 2008 to 2023—serving as its inaugural James and Anna Marie Spilker Chair from 2022 to 2023—directed the Stanford-King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology Center of Excellence for Aeronautics and Astronautics from 2014 to 2024, and led the Army High Performance Computing Research Center from 2007 to 2018. He has served on national advisory boards such as the Space Technology Industry-Government-University Roundtable (2017-2023), U.S. Air Force Scientific Advisory Board (2015-2019), and Bureau of Industry and Security's Emerging Technology and Research Advisory Committee (2008-2018).

Farhat's research focuses on computational methods in aerospace engineering, encompassing fluid-structure interaction, computational fluid dynamics, aeroelasticity, structural dynamics, acoustics, high-performance computing, model order reduction, uncertainty quantification, and physics-based machine learning for applications including autonomous carrier landings, hypersonic flight dynamics, supersonic parachute inflation, and digital twinning. He has authored over 650 refereed publications, including "The discrete geometric conservation law and the nonlinear stability of ALE schemes for the solution of flow problems on moving grids" (2001), "A dynamic variational multiscale method for large eddy simulations on unstructured meshes" (2006), "A mechanics-informed artificial neural network approach in data-driven constitutive modeling" (2022), and "Sensitivity Analysis and Validation of a Computational Framework for Supersonic Parachute Inflation Dynamics" (2024). His impact is evidenced by election to the National Academy of Engineering (2013), Royal Academy of Engineering (UK, 2016), and Lebanese Academy of Sciences (2017); major awards such as the Daniel Guggenheim Medal (2026), Kuwait Prize in Applied Sciences (2024), Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship (2023), Spirit of St. Louis Medal (2017), John von Neumann Medal (2009), Gordon Bell Prize (2002), and Sidney Fernbach Award (1997); and editorial leadership as Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering (2014-2024) and International Journal for Numerical Methods in Fluids (2017-2024).