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UNIVERSITY AWARD

Outstanding Young Researcher Award 2021

Dr Zhiwen ZHANG

Dr Zhiwen ZHANG
Associate Professor
Department of Mathematics

Dr Zhiwen ZHANG, Department of Mathematics, received his BSc and PhD degrees from Tsinghua University in 2006 and 2011, respectively. After being a Postdoctoral Scholar at the California Institute of Technology for four years, he joined the University of Hong Kong in 2015 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2021. 

Many problems in sciences and engineering are full of uncertainty, such as flow transport in porous media and electrons propagating in impure conductors. Building mathematical models to study these problems is called uncertainty quantification (UQ). Stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs) play an important role in UQ. However, these problems are challenging due to the curse of dimensionality. Dr Zhang found that solutions of SPDEs have certain low-dimensional approximations. Thus, he successfully developed model reduction methods to solve these problems. Moreover, he developed robust structure-preserving schemes for computing effective diffusivities and front propagations in 3D chaotic and random flows. His methods can alleviate the curse of dimensionality and compute many real-world problems, including reservoir simulation, quantum metamaterials design, and turbulent combustion, which has generated a broad impact on the UQ field. His work has been published in top journals in his research area, including SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis, SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, and Journal of Computational Physics

Dr Zhang believes that if you have the courage to study challenging problems, work hard with passion, are good at learning from others, and at the same time have good perseverance, then it is possible to succeed through exerting your strengths and creativity.