Rate My Professor Yong Hoon Lee

Yong Hoon Lee is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Memphis, a position he has held since August 2022. He received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2020, with a dissertation entitled "Methods for the Integrated Design of Viscoelastic Materials and Structural Geometry." He earned his M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Ajou University in 2010 and his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the same institution in 2008. Earlier in his career, Dr. Lee served as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from July 2020 to August 2022. He was a Lecturer in the Department of Mechanical and Automotive Engineering at Masan University from March to June 2014 and worked as a Research Engineer in the Nuclear Energy Division of Korea Nuclear Engineering & Services Corp. from June 2010 to August 2013.

Dr. Lee's research focuses on multidisciplinary design analysis and optimization, control co-design, multi-fidelity modeling, surrogate-based optimization, computational modeling and analysis in fluid applications and systems, and renewable energy systems including offshore wind, ocean wave, and current energy. His research applications encompass offshore wind farms, floating offshore wind turbines, hydrokinetic turbines, eVTOL urban mobility, EV battery thermal management systems, energy grid optimization, and biomimetic micro aerial vehicles. As principal investigator, he leads U.S. Department of Energy ARPA-E projects such as "Wind Energy with Integrated Servo-control (WEIS): A Tool Set to Enable Controls Co-Design of Floating Offshore Wind Energy Systems" (2023-2026) and "A Low-Cost Floating Offshore Vertical Axis Wind System" (2023). Selected publications include "Wind turbine control co-design using dynamic system derivative function surrogate model (DFSM) based on OpenFAST linearization" in Applied Energy (2025), "Nested control co-design of a spar buoy horizontal-axis floating offshore wind turbine" in Ocean Engineering (2025), "Multidisciplinary modeling and control co-design of a floating offshore vertical-axis wind turbine system" in Journal of Mechanical Design (2025), and "Enhancing full-film lubrication performance via arbitrary surface texture design" in Journal of Mechanical Design (2017), which earned an Honorable Mention for the 2017 Journal of Mechanical Design Editor's Choice Award. Additional honors include ASME 50th Design Automation Conference Papers of Distinction (2024) and the Outstanding Lecture Award from the Korean-American Scientists and Engineers Association (2023). He has given invited lectures at Cornell University, NASA Glenn Research Center, and Texas A&M University.