Charbel Farhat

Leader of the development of the Finite Element Tearing and Interconnecting (FETI) method for the scalable solution of large-scale systems of equations on massively parallel processors, Farhat is the Vivian Church Hoff Professor of Aircraft Structures in the School of Engineering at Stanford University. He has also served as Chairman of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Professor in the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering, Director of the Army High Performance Computing Research Center, and Director of the King Abdullah City of Science and Technology Center of Excellence for Aeronautics and Astronautics. He has also served on the United States Bureau of Industry and Security's Emerging Technology and Research Advisory Committee (ETRAC) at the United States Department of Commerce, and on the Technical Assessment Boards of several national and international research councils and foundations.

He earned his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley (UC Berkeley) in 1987 and began his 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 before joining Stanford. FETI was incorporated in several finite element production and commercial software in the U.S. and Europe. It enabled the Sandia National Laboratories' structural dynamics code SALINAS to win a Gordon Bell Prize in the special accomplishment category based on innovation.

He also developed the three-field computational framework for coupled nonlinear fluid-structure interaction problems. With his co-workers, Farhat introduced the concept of a Discrete Geometric Conservation Law (DGCL) and established its relationship to the nonlinear stability of CFD schemes on moving grids. This led to the development of the nonlinear aeroelastic software AERO, which was used for many applications ranging from the shape sensitivity analysis of Formula 1 cars to the nonlinear flutter analysis of supersonic business jet concepts.

He is listed as an ISI Highly Cited Author in Engineering by the ISI Web of Knowledge, Thomson Scientific Company. For his lasting contributions to aeroelasticity, CFD on moving grids, computational acoustics, computational mechanics, and high performance computing, he has received numerous awards and academic distinctions. Farhat is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of six international professional societies: the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the World Innovation Foundation, the International Association of Computational Mechanics, the U.S. Association of Computational Mechanics, and the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics. He has also served as an Editor of the International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering and the International Journal for Numerical Methods in Fluids.

He has received several prestigious awards including the United States Presidential Young Investigator Award (1989) from the National Science Foundation and the White House; the CRAY Research Award (1989, 1990); the IBM SuperPrize Achievement Award (1995); the IEEE Computer Society 1997 Sidney Fernbach Award, "For outstanding contributions to the development of parallel numerical algorithms and parallel software packages that have helped the mechanical engineering world to embrace parallel processing technology"; the Modeling and Simulation Award from the Department of Defense (2001); the IACM Award, International Association of Computational Mechanics (2012); the Gordon Bell Award, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (2002); the John von Neumann Medal, U.S. Association of Computational Mechanics (2009); the R. H. Gallagher Special Achievement Award for Young Investigators, U.S. Association of Computational Mechanics (1997); the Structures, Structural Dynamics and Materials Award, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (2010); the Lifetime Achievement Award, American Society of Mechanical Engineers (2011); and the Gauss-Newton Medal, International Association of Computational Mechanics (2014).

Also in 2011, Farhat was knighted by the Prime Minister of France in the Order of Academic Palms and awarded the Medal of Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Academiques. In 2013, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. Most recently, he was designated by the U.S. Navy recruiters as a Primary Key-Influencer and flew with the Blue Angels during Fleet Week 2014.