Rate My Professor Hao Zhang

Associate Professor Hao Zhang is a faculty member in the School of Civil Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, at the University of Sydney, where he has been since 2008. He currently serves as Director of Undergraduate Education for the School and is associated with the Centre for Advanced Structural Engineering and the Structures Group. Zhang holds a PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, completed in 2005, as well as Bachelor of Engineering and Master of Engineering degrees earned in 1998 and 2001, respectively. Prior to academia, he worked in industry.

Zhang's research specializations encompass structural reliability, time-dependent reliability assessment, and system reliability analysis for steel frames, scaffolds, and large-scale infrastructure under loads including gravity, wind, seismic activity, cyclones, floods, and tsunamis. His academic interests include developing probabilistic frameworks for loss models and reliability assessments, non-probabilistic and hybrid approaches to uncertainty quantification, experimental and numerical studies of bolted connections, beam-to-column joints, and angle connections, as well as scalable risk assessment incorporating spatial correlations and climate change effects. Key contributions address system-based design of planar steel frames, beam-element-based analysis of buckled members, and direct design methods aligned with standards such as Eurocode, AISC, and AS/NZS. Zhang has produced over 88 peer-reviewed publications, with more than 5,000 citations on Google Scholar and an h-index reflecting significant impact in structural engineering. Representative works include "A probabilistic framework to construct tropical cyclone loss models for building portfolios" (2026), "Ductile Fracture Simulation of Shear-Out Strength Behavior and Design Equations of Bolted Lap Joints" (2025), "System factors for the direct design of steel frames in the Eurocode framework" (2024), and earlier papers such as "System-based design of planar steel frames" (2016) and "Beam-element-based analysis of locally and/or distortionally buckled members" (2016), published in leading journals like Journal of Constructional Steel Research, Thin-Walled Structures, and Engineering Structures. His research enhances structural safety, design optimization, and resilience against natural hazards.