Charbel Farhat is the Vivian Church Hoff Professor of Aircraft Structures in the School of Engineering at Stanford University, where he also serves as a professor in the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering. From 2008 to 2023, he chaired the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, serving from 2022 to 2023 as its inaugural James and Anna Marie Spilker Chair. He directed the Stanford-King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology Center of Excellence for Aeronautics and Astronautics (2014--2024) and has served on multiple national advisory boards, including the Space Technology Industry-Government-University Roundtable (2017--2023), the U.S. Air Force Scientific Advisory Board (2015--2019), and the Bureau of Industry and Security’s Emerging Technology and Research Advisory Committee (2008--2018). From 2007 to 2018, he was Director of the Army High Performance Computing Research Center at Stanford. Recognized by the U.S. Navy as a Primary Key-Influencer, he flew with the Blue Angels during Fleet Week 2014.
He holds a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, and is a member of three national academies: the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, the Royal Academy of Engineering (UK), and the Lebanese Academy of Sciences. His honors include a Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship from the Department of Defense and Docteur Honoris Causa degrees from Ecole Normale Superieure Paris-Saclay, Ecole Centrale de Nantes, and Ecole Nationale Superieure d'Arts et Metiers. He is a laureate of the 2024 Kuwait Prize in Applied Sciences (Engineering Sciences), the Takreem USA Foundation Award for Scientific and Technological Achievement, and is recognized as an ISI Highly Cited Researcher in Engineering.
Farhat is a Fellow of several professional societies, including AIAA, ASME, IACM, SES, SIAM, USACM, and WIF. He was knighted in the Order of Academic Palms and awarded the Chevalier Medal by the Prime Minister of France. His distinctions include the ASME Lifetime Achievement Award and Spirit of St. Louis Medal; the AIAA Ashley Award for Aeroelasticity, Structures, Structural Dynamics & Materials Award, Collier Aerospace HyperX/AIAA Structures Award, and Journal Authors Seminar Award; the SAE International Computational Fluid Dynamics Award; the Aurel Stodola Medal from ETH Zurich; and the ALERT Geomaterials Medal. From USACM, he has received the John von Neumann Medal, the Computational & Applied Sciences Award, and the R.H. Gallagher Special Achievement Award. His contributions to computational mechanics have also been recognized with the Gauss-Newton Medal, IACM Award, Computational Mechanics Award, and Young Investigator Award from IACM. Additionally, he has received the IEEE Gordon Bell Prize and Sidney Fernbach Award, the Grand Prize from the Japan Society for Computational Engineering and Science, the Department of Defense Modeling & Simulation Award, and the NSF/White House Presidential Young Investigator Award.
From 2014 to 2024, Farhat served as Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering and, from 2017 to 2024, of the International Journal for Numerical Methods in Fluids. He is currently an Associate Editor of the Journal of Computational Physics and a member of the editorial boards of eight international scientific journals.
Career
Farhat began his academic career at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he served as Chairman of the Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences and Director of the Center for Aerospace Structures. In 2004, he joined Stanford University, where he currently holds the Vivian Church Hoff Chair of Aircraft Structures in the School of Engineering.
He is one of the lead developers of the Finite Element Tearing and Interconnecting (FETI) method, a major development in the scalable solution of large-scale systems of equations on massively parallel processors. This method has been incorporated into several finite element production and commercial software programs in the U.S. and Europe. Notably, it enabled the structural dynamics code SALINAS at Sandia National Laboratories to secure a Gordon Bell Prize in the special accomplishment category for innovation.
Farhat also pioneered the three-field computational framework for solving coupled nonlinear fluid-structure interaction problems. His contributions include co-developing the concept of a Discrete Geometric Conservation Law (DGCL) and establishing its fundamental role in ensuring the nonlinear stability of CFD schemes on moving grids. These advancements led to the development of the nonlinear aeroelastic software AERO Suite, which has been applied to diverse challenges ranging from the shape sensitivity analysis of Formula 1 cars to the nonlinear flutter analysis of supersonic business jet concepts.
Research monographs
Charbel Farhat and Francois-Xavier Roux, Implicit Parallel Processing in Structural Mechanics, Computational Mechanics Advances, Vol. II, No. 1, pp.1–124 (1994)
Charbel Farhat, Domain Decomposition and Parallel Processing, Postgraduate Studies in Supercomputing, ed. FNRS/NFWO, Universie de Liege, Belgium, 1992.
Charbel Farhat, An Introduction to Parallel Scientific Computations, Postgraduate Studies in Supercomputing, ed. FNRS/NFWO, Universite de Liege, Belgium, 1991.
Major awards and honors
Flying in Blue Angel Hornet
ALERT Geomaterials Medal (2025)
Aurel Stodola Medal (2025)
Laureate of the Takreem USA Foundation for Scientific and Technological Achievement (2025)
SAE International Award for Computational Fluid Dynamics (2025)
Designated by the US Navy recruiters as a Primary Key-Influencer (2014) and flown by the Blue Angels during Fleet Week 2014
The Gauss-Newton Medal [3] (2014), the O.C. Zienkiewicz Award [4] (2012), the Computational Mechanics Award [5] (2002), and the John Argyris Award for Young Scientists [6] (1998), International Association of Computational Mechanics (IACM)
The John von Neumann Award [8] (2009), the J. Tinsley Oden Medal [8] (2001), and the R. H. Gallagher Special Achievement Award [8] (1997), United States Association of Computational Mechanics
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