Charbel Farhat

Charbel Farhat is an aerospace engineer and computational scientist who is the Vivian Church Hoff Professor of Aircraft Structures in the School of Engineering at Stanford University. He is also a professor in Stanford's Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering. From 2008 to 2023, he chaired Stanford's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, serving from 2022 to 2023 as the inaugural James and Anna Marie Spilker Chair of the department.

Farhat's work is in computational mechanics, high-performance computing, computational fluid dynamics, aeroelasticity, and fluid–structure interaction. He is known for contributions to scalable finite-element algorithms, including the FETI method, and for computational methods for moving-grid fluid dynamics, coupled nonlinear fluid–structure systems, model order reduction, and simulation-based engineering.

He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, an International Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and a member of the Lebanese Academy of Sciences. His honors include the Daniel Guggenheim Medal, the Gordon Bell Prize, the Sidney Fernbach Award, a Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship, the Kuwait Prize in Applied Sciences, the John von Neumann Medal, and the Gauss-Newton Medal.

Education Farhat's early higher education was in France. In 1983, he received a Diplôme d'Ingénieur from École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures, the engineering grande école historically known as École Centrale Paris. The same year, he received an M.S. in applied mechanics from Université de Paris VI.

After studying in France, Farhat continued his graduate education at the University of California, Berkeley. Stanford's professional education listing gives an M.S. in structural engineering and structural mechanics from Berkeley in 1984, an M.S. in electrical engineering and computer sciences in 1986, and a Ph.D. in civil engineering in 1987.

In 2004, Farhat joined Stanford University, where he became a professor in the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering. He later became the Vivian Church Hoff Professor of Aircraft Structures in the School of Engineering. He chaired Stanford's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics from 2008 to 2023 and served as the department's inaugural James and Anna Marie Spilker Chair from 2022 to 2023. With Geuzaine and Gregory Brown, he applied a three-field nonlinear fluid–structure formulation to aeroelastic prediction for an F-16 fighter aircraft.

His more recent research interests include high-performance multi-scale modeling, embedded boundary methods for computational fluid dynamics and fluid–structure interaction, Bayesian optimization, uncertainty quantification, physics-based machine learning, mechanics-informed neural networks, nonlinear projection-based model order reduction, and digital twinning. Olof B. Widlund Prize for Excellence in Domain Decomposition Methods (2024). Docteur Honoris Causa, École Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay (2017). Spirit of St. Louis Medal, American Society of Mechanical Engineers (2017). Ashley Award for Aeroelasticity, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (2017). Grand Prize, Japan Society for Computational Engineering and Science (2017). Election as an International Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (2016). Gauss-Newton Medal, International Association for Computational Mechanics (2014). Election to the National Academy of Engineering (2013). Knight in the Order of Academic Palms of France (2011). Lifetime Achievement Award, American Society of Mechanical Engineers Computers and Information in Engineering Division (2011). Structures, Structural Dynamics and Materials Award, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (2010). John von Neumann Medal, United States Association for Computational Mechanics (2009). Gordon Bell Prize (2002). Sidney Fernbach Award (1997). Presidential Young Investigator Award, National Science Foundation and the White House (1989).

Editorial and professional service From 2014 to 2024, Farhat served as editor-in-chief of the International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering. From 2017 to 2024, he served as editor-in-chief of the International Journal for Numerical Methods in Fluids. He is an associate editor of the Journal of Computational Physics and serves on the editorial boards of several other scientific journals.

Selected monographs and survey publications Charbel Farhat and François-Xavier Roux, "Implicit Parallel Processing in Structural Mechanics", Computational Mechanics Advances, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 1–124 (1994). Charbel Farhat, Domain Decomposition and Parallel Processing, Postgraduate Studies in Supercomputing, FNRS/NFWO, Université de Liège, Belgium (1992). Charbel Farhat, An Introduction to Parallel Scientific Computations, Postgraduate Studies in Supercomputing, FNRS/NFWO, Université de Liège, Belgium (1991).