IDE assistant professor wins Young Investigator Award

Last week at the Symposium on Solid and Physical Modelling, IDE assistant professor Jun Wu was awarded the Young Investigator Award from the Solid Modeling Association.

The Solid Modeling Association (SMA) serves research, development, and user communities in CAD/CAM and in the broader field of solid modelling and its applications. The SMA Young Investigator Award was introduced in 2019 to recognise outstanding accomplishments, particularly outstanding published papers in the area of solid modelling, by researchers of 40 years or younger.

For this award, Jun was recognised for his outstanding technical contributions at the intersection of solid modelling, physical modelling, and advanced manufacturing.

One of his most recognised pieces of work is bone-inspired infill optimisation. The bone-like models are lightweight and exhibit superior mechanical properties. In a similar direction, he has also developed novel methods to concurrently optimise digital models and their internal geometry (see link). And he has further explored geometric and numerical algorithms (e.g., hex meshing, geometric multigrid) to accelerate the generative design process. In a related thread, Assistant Professor Wu proposed innovative methods to design self-supporting 3D printing infill and functionally graded meta-materials (see link 1 and link 2). His recent work on space-time topology optimization is yet another example of a very original and promising contribution. The idea of introducing the time dimension in structural optimization opens a new direction of research by enabling the concurrent design of digital models and their corresponding fabrication process order.