Yonghao Zhang

Zhang Yonghao is a prominent Chinese-born physicist specializing in superfast fluid dynamics who left the University of Edinburgh, where he held a chair professorship, to join China's newly established national hypersonic laboratory in Beijing after more than 20 years in the United Kingdom.

Zhang moved to Britain in the early 2000s to work as a computational scientist at Daresbury Laboratory, later becoming Weir Professor of Thermodynamics and Fluid Mechanics at the University of Strathclyde before his 2020 appointment as chair professor at Edinburgh. He now leads an innovation team at the National Key Laboratory of Science and Technology on Aerothermodynamics in Hypersonic Flight, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Mechanics in Beijing, developing advanced computational methods for simulating gas behavior at the extreme speeds and temperatures hypersonic vehicles must withstand.