Gaoyuan Wu

Hi! My name is Gaoyuan Wu, a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University. I recently obtained my PhD in civil engineering from Princeton University, advised by Prof. Maria Garlock. Prior to Princeton, I did my undergraduate studies in civil engineering at Tongji University with a focus in bridge engineering.

I am from Chengdu (成都), a city in southwest China. I love our dialects, our amazing food and, of course, pandas! In my free time, I enjoy a variety of sports — tennis, soccer, badminton, and indoor rock climbing. I love listening to music — I am a proud top 1% listener of Wu Bai and Faye Wong, according to Spotify.

Research

For a full list of publications, please see my publications page or my Google Scholar profile. A few selected projects are highlighted below.

Enhancing coastal resilience of infrastructure

My research integrates structural engineering, coastal engineering, and optimization technique (e.g., Bayesian Optimization) to make infrastructure more resilient against extreme wave loads induced by climate-influenced hazards.

Differentiable finite element analysis for structural optimization and integration with machine learning

JaxSSO is a differentiable finite element analysis (FEA) solver built on JAX, enabling gradient-based structural optimization that reduces embodied carbon while achieving structural elegance (Wu, 2023; Wu, 2024). It also enables training of neural networks (NN) with physics enforced in the loop.

For more on this work, see the JaxSSO project page and codes page.