Faculty Team

CSU/CWRU team of faculty mentors from Mechanical Engineering (Zhang, Goudarzi, and Tao), Civil and Environment Engineering (Yu, Carloni, and Markfort), Applied Mathematics (Zhao and Wu), and Energy Policy & Urban Affairs (Thomas), bring a wide range of research expertise and interdisciplinary perspectives on wind energy research.

Dr. Wei Zhang aims to improve wind flow modeling in the context of urban wind environment, sur- face heterogeneity and atmospheric thermal stability for wind energy research. She strongly supports STEM students’ attendance at conferences and workshops.

Dr. Bill Yu conducts research on wind resource assessment, turbine foundation design, wind energy application in transportation. He has mentored a large number of undergraduate students in research. As the Department Chair, he also works closely with the Women in Science and Engineering Roundtable (WISER) program in K-12 outreaches.

Dr. Yong Tao’s research experience covers thermal/fluids sciences, renewable energy and energy efficiency in buildings. He has led an NSF RCN program on Sustainable Human-Building Ecosystems, mentored graduate/undergraduate students in international, collaborative research among engineering, architecture, computer science and social science disciplines.

Dr. Corey Markfort’s research focuses on improving the measurement and prediction of environmental boundary-layer flows, with applications to air and water resource sustainability, land-atmosphere/air-water interactions, and renewable energy including wind energy.

Dr. Christian Carloni ’s research interests include the formation and propagation of cracks in quasi-brittle materials (e.g., concrete, ceramics, fiber-reinforced composites), historical masonry structures, and the use of innovative composite material to repair and strengthen damaged structures including wind turbines.

Dr.  Navid Goudarzi has eight years of interdisciplinary research experience in renewable energy,  in particular offshore wind/ocean systems. He integrates machine learning algorithms into experimental and numerical models. He has mentored graduate and undergraduate students in the past five years.

Dr. Yuping Wu is an expert in applied statistics and data science. Her research is at the intersection of life science, physical systems and computational modeling. She develops user-friendly software that offers flexibility for data manipulation and visualization for researchers of all disciplines.

Dr.  Longhua  Zhao focuses on interactions between fluid flows and structures for broad applications in engineering, biology, and medicine. Specific applications include microfluidic tweezers and wind effects on the spider-dragline systems. She started collaborating with the PI Zhang since 2017.

Andrew Thomas is the Director of the Energy Policy Center at the Levin College of Urban Affairs at CSU and an energy lawyer. He researches energy markets and electricity regulation, with specific focus on energy storage, distributed generation, and microgrid adoption. He teaches energy law and policy and has mentored a number of law and engineering students over the past several years.