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Jessica Zhang is the George Tallman Ladd Florence Barrett Ladd Professor and Chair of the Graduate Education Committee in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. She has an extensive academic background, earning her Ph.D. in Computational Engineering Sciences from the University of Texas at Austin, and her Master of Engineering and Bachelor of Engineering degrees from Tsinghua University, China. Zhang's research focuses on computational geometry, isogeometric analysis, finite element methods, data-driven modeling, image processing, and mesh generation, with applications in computational biomedicine and materials science engineering. She has authored over 240 technical articles in peer-reviewed journals and has published a book titled 'Geometric Modeling and Mesh Generation for Scanned Images'. Among her notable awards are the 2025 ASME Van C. Mow Medal and the AWM-SIAM Sonia Kovalevsky Lecture Award. Zhang has also received several prestigious grants and fellowships, including the NSF CAREER Award and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, further demonstrating her leadership in the field. Her work is committed to developing novel algorithms for biomodeling at molecular, cellular, tissue, and organ scales.
Admission is extremely competitive with no strict GPA cut-offs; holistic review is used.