Rate My Professor Xiaolin Zhong

Xiaolin Zhong is Professor and Chair of the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Samueli School of Engineering. He received his B.S. in Fluid Mechanics from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, in 1984, followed by two years of graduate studies in computational fluid mechanics at the same institution. Zhong earned his Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Stanford University in 1991, with a thesis on the development and computation of continuum higher-order constitutive relations for two-dimensional high-altitude hypersonic flows, advised by Professors Robert W. MacCormack and Dean R. Chapman. Joining UCLA in 1991 as an Assistant Professor, he was promoted to Associate Professor in 1997 and to full Professor in 2002. He served as Vice Chair for Graduate Affairs from 2006 to 2011 and assumed the role of Department Chair in July 2022. Zhong also serves as the Area Director for Aerospace Engineering in UCLA's Master of Science in Engineering Online program.

Zhong leads the Hypersonics and Computational Aerodynamics Group, focusing on computational fluid dynamics applied to hypersonic flows. His research interests include development of very high-order numerical methods; numerical simulations 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 interactions with turbulence; and numerical studies of wave energy harvesting devices. With approximately 300 publications, key contributions include 'Direct Numerical Simulation on the Receptivity, Instability, and Transition of Hypersonic Boundary Layers' (Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics, 2012, with X. Wang), 'High-Order Finite-Difference Schemes for Numerical Simulation of Hypersonic Boundary-Layer Transition' (Journal of Computational Physics, 1998), 'Boundary-layer receptivity of Mach 7.99 flow over a blunt cone to free-stream acoustic waves' (Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 2006, with Y. Ma), and recent works such as 'Bi-orthogonal decomposition for slow acoustic pulse receptivity simulation of hypersonic boundary layer over a blunt cone' (Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 2025, with Z. Zou and S. He). His achievements include the Allied Signal Faculty Research Award (1996), election as Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (2000), and membership in Phi Tau Phi Scholastic Honor Society (2000). Zhong has served as Associate Editor of the AIAA Journal (2005-2015) and on various AIAA technical committees. He regularly teaches undergraduate courses such as Elementary Fluid Mechanics, Aerodynamics, Mathematics of Engineering, and Numerical Methods for Engineering Applications, as well as graduate courses including Compressible Flows, Computational Aerodynamics, and Hypersonic and High-Temperature Gas Dynamics.