Stephen Schrank Early Career Chair in Civil and Environmental Engineering and Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Education
- 2014, Doctoral Degree, Mechanical Engineering, Duke University
- 2010, Bachelor's Degree, Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, Fudan University
Biography
Qiming Wang is an Associate Professor and endowed Stephen Schrank Early Career Chair at Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Prior to joining the University of Southern California, he was a postdoctoral associate in Mechanical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2014-2015) and received Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at Duke University in 2014. He received EMI Leonardo Da Vinci Award (2022), ONR YIP Award (2021), NSF CAREER Award (2020), SME Outstanding Young Manufacturing Engineer Award (2020), AFOSR YIP Award (2018), MRS Graduate Student Award (2014), ACS Arthur K. Doolittle Award (2014), Kewaunee Student Achievement Award (2013), Lew Pre-doctoral Fellowship (2012), and ASME Applied Mechanics Division Best Paper Award (2011). He was elected to serve as the Editor (2018), Secretary (2019), Vice Chair (2020), and Chair (2021) of the ASME technical committee on the mechanics of soft materials. His research in bioinspired manufacturing and mechanics has been reported by more than 200 news articles, including those in prestigious media such as Discovery, Washington Post, BBC Focus, NBC News, Wall Street Journal, NASA Tech Briefs, Materials Today, Physics Today, and NSF News.
Research Summary
His research is focused on bioinspired manufacturing and mechanics of unprecedented materials and structures that can potentially address grand engineering challenges in civil and environmental engineering. His recent focus is to address how to restore and improve urban infrastructure: He proposes to harness living chemistry to design novel structures that can enable self-healing and self-strengthening in response to destructive environmental stressors (such as cyclic loads, greenhouse gases, water, and light). He also proposes to harness living microorganisms to design Engineered Living Materials for the next-generation living infrastructure that can self-replicate, self-grow, self-heal, and self-strengthen.
In terms of disciplines and scientific tools, his group integrates experiments, theories, and computations to study cutting-edge problems in two areas: (1) Advanced Manufacturing: additive manufacturing and bioinspired manufacturing processes. (2) Mechanics of Materials and Structures: (a) Engineered Living Materials: microorganism-material hybrids and plant-material hybrids; (b) Smart Materials: stimuli-responsive materials, self-healing materials, and polymer mechanochemistry; (c) Architected Materials: acoustic metamaterials and mechanical metamaterials.
Awards
- 2022 American Society of Civil Engineers EMI Leonardo Da Vinci Award
- 2021 Office of Naval Research ONR Young Investigator Award
- 2020 Society of Manufacturing Engineers SME Outstanding Young Manufacturing Engineer Award
- 2020 National Science Foundation NSF CAREER Award
- 2020 Orange County Engineering Council OCEC Outstanding Young Engineer
- 2018 Air Force Office of Scientific Research AFOSR Young Investigator Award
- 2014 Materials Research Society MRS Graduate Student Award
- 2014 Chinese Ministry of Education Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-financed Students Abroad
- 2014 American Chemical Society Arthur K. Doolittle Award
- 2013 Duke University Kewaunee Student Achievement Award
- 2013 International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics NSF-PACAM fellowship for PACAM XII
- 2012 Duke University Lew Pre-doctoral Fellowship
- 2011 The American Society of Mechanical Engineers Haythornthwaite Foundation Travel Award
- 2011 The American Society of Mechanical Engineers ASME Best Student Paper Award
- 2011 Duke University Triangle MRSEC Fellowship
