Speakers

Bio

Thomas Elguedj is a full professor of mechanical engineering at INSA Lyon whose research focuses mainly on the development of isogeometric analysis (IGA) for advanced problems in computational mechanics. His work aims at strengthening the integration between geometric modeling and numerical simulation, with particular emphasis on high-order methods and geometry-consistent discretizations. He graduated from École Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay and obtained his Master’s degree and PhD from INSA Lyon. Following postdoctoral positions at the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (UT Austin) and CNRS, he was appointed assistant professor at INSA Lyon in 2008. He received his Habilitation to supervise research from Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 in 2014 and was promoted to full professor in 2017. His contributions to IGA include the development of robust and efficient formulations addressing key challenges such as analysis-suitable model generation and multi-patch coupling, locking phenomena, shell modeling, and domain decomposition strategies. More recently, his research has focused on scalable space–time formulations and efficient computational strategies to enable the simulation of complex industrial processes, including thermo-mechanical problems arising in additive manufacturing.

Bio

Thomas J.R. Hughes holds B.E. and M.E. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Pratt Institute and an M.S. in Mathematics and Ph.D. in Engineering Science from the University of California at Berkeley. He taught at Berkeley, Caltech and Stanford before joining the University of Texas at Austin in 2002. 

He is an elected member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the US National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas, and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society of London, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and the Istituto Lombardo Accademia di Scienze e Lettere. Dr. Hughes has received honorary doctorates from the universities of Louvain, Pavia, Padua, Trondheim, Northwestern, A Coruña, and INSA Lyon.

Dr. Hughes is one of the most widely cited authors in Engineering Science. He has received the Huber Prize and Von Karman Medal from ASCE, the Timoshenko, Worcester Reed Warner, and Melville Medals from ASME, the Von Neumann Medal from USACM, the Gauss-Newton Medal from IACM, the Computational Mechanics Award of the Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers, the Grand Prize from the Japanese Society of Computational Engineering and Sciences, the Computational Mechanics Award of the Japanese Association for Computational Mechanics, the Humboldt Research Award for Senior Scientists from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the AMCA Award for an International Scientific Career from the Argentinian Association for Computational Mechanics, and the Wilhem Exner Medal from the Austrian Association für SME (Öesterreichischer Gewerbeverein, OGV). He is an Honorary Member of the Japanese Association for Computational Mechanics (JACM). 

He has also received several honors in mathematics. Noteworthy among them are the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Ralph E. Kleinman Prize, the SIAM and Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Computational Science and Engineering Prize, and the William Benter Prize in Applied Mathematics. He was also a plenary lecturer at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in 2010, held every four years, which is considered one of the highest honors in mathematics. He was only the second engineer since 1897 to deliver a plenary lecture at the ICM, the first being Theodore von Karman in 1928.

The Special Achievement Award for Young Investigators in Applied Mechanics is an award given annually by the Applied Mechanics Division of ASME. In 2008 this award was renamed the Thomas J.R. Hughes Young Investigator Award.

In 2012 the Computational Fluid Mechanics Award of the United States Association of Computational Mechanics was renamed the Thomas J.R. Hughes Medal.

Bio

Dr. Michael A. Scott is a globally recognized leader in isogeometric analysis (IGA) whose work has helped define the field in both academia and industry. He earned his Ph.D. from The University of Texas at Austin in 2011 and served on the civil engineering faculty at Brigham Young University until 2022, when he left academia to lead Coreform full-time. While being named a Highly Cited Researcher seven years in a row, he also led Coreform as an Inc. 5000 company for four consecutive years. Dr. Scott founded Coreform in 2014 and led the development of Coreform IGA, the world’s first commercial general-use IGA solver.

Bio

Xiaodong Wei is an Associate Professor in the Global College at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. His research lies at the intersection of geometry and analysis, with a specific focus on unstructured splines, immersed boundary methods, and their integration with scientific machine learning. Prior to joining SJTU, he held a postdoctoral position at EPFL and earned his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University. He currently serves as an Associate Editor of Engineering with Computers and is a recipient of the NSFC Excellent Young Scientists Fund (Overseas).

Bio

Jinhui Yan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego in 2016, followed by a two-year postdoctoral appointment at Northwestern University before joining the faculty at UIUC. His research group works broadly on computational mechanics and its scientific and engineering applications. He received the ASME Robert M. and Mary Haythornthwaite Young Investigator Award in 2018 and the Gallagher Young Investigator Medal from the U.S. Association for Computational Mechanics (USACM) in 2023. His research group's additive manufacturing (AM) model won first place in the 2025 NIST AM Benchmark Modeling Competition, and his work was recognized with the Best Paper in Manufacturing Technology Award from the Vertical Flight Society in 2024. He is a Levenick Teaching Fellow and is often recognized as an excellent teacher by students at UIUC. He currently serves as Chair of the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and Fluid–Structure Interaction (FSI) Technical Thrust of USACM. More information can be https://yan.cee.illinois.edu/