Li receives Career Development Chair Award

Professor Hengguang Li has received the 2017 Wayne State University Career Development Chair Award.

Career Development Chairs are awarded to as many as seven recently tenured faculty as part of the university's program to support the teaching and research endeavors of faculty members in the developmental stages of their scholarly careers.

Since 1982, 238 university faculty members have held Career Development Chairs. The Career Development Chairs were established by generous grants to the Wayne State Fund and provide recipients financial support, encouragement and recognition at a critical time in their careers.

Professor Hengguang Li's research focuses on numerical analysis and scientific computing, including the development of innovative techniques for performing computations across multiple scientific disciplines. More specifically, Professor Li's research has attracted a great amount of interest due to its broad applicability to physics, engineering, finance and several other fields.

His techniques have become internationally recognized and used in the design and implementation of new algorithms for approximating equations with singular solutions. His dissertation research was published by VDM Verlag in 2008 under the title A Weighted Approach to Elliptic Equations with Singularities: A-priori Analysis and Numerical Methods. Additionally, he has published more than 25 peer-reviewed papers and raised more than $500,000 to support his research. The Career Development Chair will support Professor Li's current work, which proposes a new family of anisotropic meshes for 3-D polyhedral domains.

This work includes planned collaborations at Sun Yat-Sen University (China) and the use of TH-2, one of the fastest supercomputers in the world. This ambitious project will extend many theoretical numerical results in two dimensions to the three-dimensional case that is central to real-life applications.