Rate My Professor Xiaolin Zhong

Professor Xiaolin Zhong is Chair and Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Samueli School of Engineering. He joined UCLA in 1991 as an Assistant Professor, was promoted to Associate Professor in 1997, and to Full Professor in 2002. From 2006 to 2011, he served as Vice Chair for Graduate Affairs in the department. Zhong earned his Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Stanford University in 1991, with a thesis titled “Development and Computation of Continuum Higher Order Constitutive Relations for Two-Dimensional High-Altitude Hypersonic Flow.” He received his B.S. in Fluid Mechanics from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 1984, and performed two years of graduate studies there in Computational Fluid Mechanics from 1984 to 1986.

Zhong leads the Hypersonics and Computational Aerodynamics Group at UCLA, with research interests encompassing computational fluid dynamics; hypersonic flows; development of new very high-order numerical methods; numerical simulation of hypersonic boundary-layer receptivity, stability, and transition; real-gas hypersonic flows; high-order immersed interface methods for flow simulations; direct numerical simulation of strong shock interaction with turbulence; and numerical simulation studies of wave energy harvesting devices. His projects are supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He regularly teaches undergraduate courses on elementary fluid mechanics, aerodynamics, mathematics of engineering, and numerical methods for engineering applications, as well as graduate courses on compressible flows, computational aerodynamics, and hypersonic and high-temperature gas dynamics. Notable honors include election as an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 2000, the Allied Signal Faculty Research Award from UCLA Engineering School in 1996, and membership in the Phi Tau Phi Scholastic Honor Society, West American Chapter, in 2000. His work has garnered over 7,000 citations according to Google Scholar, influencing advancements in hypersonic aerodynamics and aerospace engineering.