Rate My Professor Leitao Chen

Leitao Chen serves as Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the College of Engineering at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Daytona Beach, a position he has held since August 2023. Previously, he was Assistant Professor at Tennessee State University from August 2020 to August 2023, Research Scientist at Rice University from November 2018 to July 2020, Postdoctoral Fellow at Rice University from August 2016 to October 2018, and Research Intern at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center from June to September 2015. His academic background includes a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh in 2016, an M.E. in Power Machinery and Engineering from Tongji University, Shanghai, China, in 2009, and a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai, China, in 2006.

Dr. Chen directs the Multiscale Advection Diffusion Analysis Laboratory (MADAL), focusing on Boltzmann models for complex thermos-fluids transport phenomena in multi-physics, nonlinear, and multiscale scenarios relevant to mechanical, biomedical, energy, aerospace, and environmental technologies. His research specializations include computational modeling of thermal systems such as thermal management for high-power CPUs and electric vehicle batteries, multiscale modeling using the Boltzmann equation, lattice Boltzmann methods, computational fluid dynamics, numerical methods for hyperbolic partial differential equations, heat transfer in energy systems, multiscale and multiphase fluid flows in porous media, low-temperature plasma physics, and data-driven modeling approaches. Key projects are A Boltzmann Simulator for Porous Media Flows and 3D Printing of Continuous Carbon Fiber Composites with Programmable Thermal Behaviors. Awards include the Faculty Excellence Award in Research from Tennessee State University in 2023 and Outstanding Reviewer recognitions from Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena, Renewable Energy, and Computers and Fluids in 2017. Notable publications comprise Godunov-type upwind flux schemes of the two-dimensional finite volume discrete Boltzmann method (Computers & Mathematics with Applications, 2018), A unified and preserved Dirichlet boundary treatment for the cell-centered finite volume discrete Boltzmann method (Physics of Fluids, 2015), Semi-Lagrangian implicit Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook collision model for the finite-volume discrete Boltzmann method (Physical Review E, 2020), and A Generative Deep Learning and Explainable Machine Learning Framework for Heat Transfer Prediction and Analysis in Porous Structures with Oscillatory Flows (Applied Thermal Engineering, 2026). He teaches Heat Transfer, Vehicle Aerodynamics, and design courses for high-performance vehicles, and is a member of ASME and ASTFE.