Faculty Profile

Wenjie Liao, PhD, Associate Research Professor, in the School of Civil Engineering at Southwest Jiaotong University, China. He finished his postdoctoral research at Tsinghua University in July 2024, received a PhD in Civil Engineering from Tsinghua University in June 2022, and a bachelor's degree in Civil Engineering from Southwest Jiaotong University in June 2017.

His research focuses on AI-powered design generation and optimization of engineering structures, particularly building structures, as well as the seismic resilience of these structures. He holds a youth project of the National Natural Science Foundation of China and Sichuan Province, and a general project of the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation. He has published more than 40 SCI/EI research papers, including the IF top-ranked journal in the civil engineering field, "Automation in Construction," the highly influential journal in the field of artificial intelligence, "Expert Systems with Applications," and the official journal of the International Association for Earthquake Engineering, "Earthquake Engineering & Structural Dynamics." Three of his papers were in the top 1% cited on InCites of WOS. He obtained more than 20 Chinese invention patents.

His research results have been applied in the AI-driven design platform for building structures (i.e., AIstructure-Copilot; see details in https://ai-structure.com), bidding for building design projects, the investigation of building structure collapse accidents, etc. His research achievements have been positively cited and evaluated by internationally renowned scholars, including the comments "perform the structural design intelligently", "GANs have been shown to be very successful in civil engineering", and "the proposed network effectively learned the physical mechanism of structural design" from elected members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Engineering, Japan Academy of Engineering, etc.

He was selected for the Shuimu Tsinghua Scholar Program of Tsinghua University and awarded the title of "Academic Newcomer" by the Department of Civil Engineering, Tsinghua University. He also won the Gold Medal with the Congratulations of the Jury at the 48th Geneva International Invention Exhibition, the 1st Prize of the CIC Construction Innovation Award 2022 (International category).