Huajian Gao

Huajian Gao is a world-renowned Chinese-American mechanician and materials scientist who left his position as Distinguished University Professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore to join Tsinghua University as a full-time Xinghua University Professor in the Department of Engineering Mechanics in January 2024, capping a career spanning some of the most prestigious institutions in the US, Europe, and Asia.

Born in Chengdu in 1963, Gao earned his BS in solid mechanics from Xi'an Jiaotong University in 1982 at age 19, then completed his MS and PhD in engineering science at Harvard University in 1984 and 1988. He held a tenured professorship at Stanford University from 1988 to 2002, served as Director of the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research in Germany from 2001 to 2006, and was the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of Engineering at Brown University from 2006 to 2019, where he remains Professor Emeritus. He then spent 2019 to 2024 as Distinguished University Professor at Nanyang Technological University and Scientific Director of the Institute of High Performance Computing at Singapore's A*STAR.

Gao's research focuses on the mechanical principles governing materials in both engineering and biological systems, spanning nanomechanics, fracture mechanics, and thin film mechanics. He is the only scientist in international mechanics to have won three of the field's top honors — the Rodney Hill Prize (2012), the Timoshenko Medal (2021), and the ASME Medal (2023) — and holds memberships in the Royal Society, the US National Academy of Sciences, the US National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He has published more than 600 papers with over 60,000 citations and serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids.