Guangzhao Chen

Guangzhao Chen is an assistant professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Construction Engineering at Texas Tech University and a faculty affiliate of the National Wind Institute. He holds a PhD in civil engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Prior to his current appointment, he served as a postdoctoral research associate at the Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure Wall of Wind and contributed to the design phase of the National Full-Scale Testing Infrastructure for Community Hardening in Extreme Wind, Surge, and Wave Events project.

His primary research objective focuses on enhancing structural resilience against extreme weather events by integrating computational methods with wind engineering. Leading a dedicated research group, Chen incorporates artificial intelligence, machine learning, and vision-language models into performance-based structural engineering. A key application of this work involves utilizing post-disaster damage data to reconstruct near-surface wind fields. This methodology addresses the critical gap caused by missing direct observation data during severe storms, ultimately improving damage assessment accuracy and informing future structural design paradigms.