Lecturer and ARC DECRA Fellow in the School of Civil & Environmental Engineering

Dr Da (Daniel) Chen is an ARC DECRA fellow and a Lecturer at School of Civil & Environmental Engineering, UNSW Sydney.

Daniel was awarded his PhD at the University of Queensland (UQ) in 06/2018. From 06/2018 to 05/2023, he was employed as a postdoctoral researcher at UQ (06/2018-04/2021), Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany (05/2021-05/2022), and the University of Melbourne (05/2022-04/2023). He started his current position at UNSW Sydney from 05/2023 as a Lecturer.

Daniel is best known for his contributions to the development of functionally graded (FG) porous structures, where the constitutive model he proposed is one of the most adopted ways to assess such structural forms. He has 7 Highly Cited Papers (top performing 1%, WoS, 11/2024) in this field, including 1 Hot Paper (top 0.1%, 11/2024). He also published the first book on FG porous structures in 2023, titled: Machine Learning Aided Analysis, Design, and Additive Manufacturing of Functionally Graded Porous Composite Structures. His works have received citations as 3447 in WoS, 3664 in Scopus, and 4052 in Google Scholar, as at 11/2024. 

The accumulated amount of research projects he is leading, reaches almost $2 million, including ARC DECRA (Smart Optimisation of Functionally Graded Porous Structures), ARC Linkage (Developing sustainable graded porous cementitious structures), Australian Composites Manufacturing (ACM) CRC-P, and UNSW-SJTU Collaborative Grant, etc.

Daniel is ranked among the top 2% scientists (single-year ranking, Stanford University, 2023 & 2024). He is also an Editorial Board Member of JCR Q1 journals (Engineering Structures, Structures). He was an invited speaker in several conferences and universities.