Zhangxian Yuan received his B.S.(2010) in Aircraft Design and Engineering and M.S. (2012) in Engineering Mechanics from Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, China, and earned his M.S. (2015) and Ph.D. (2017) in Aerospace Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Then he accepted a Postdoctoral Fellow position at the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering at the Georgia Tech, where his research focused on developing advanced high-order theories for sandwich composite structures.

In August 2020, Dr. Yuan joined the Aerospace Engineering Department at WPI as an Assistant Professor. His research interests lie primarily in the broad area of structural mechanics, with a focus on developing theoretical models and computational techniques to understand and simulate the mechanical behavior of advanced structures in order to design novel structures for extreme conditions. He is particularly interested in the nonlinear behavior and mechanical instabilities of slender structures.