Dr Wei Tan has been honoured with the prestigious ESCM Young Researcher Award at the 21st European Conference on Composite Materials (ECCM21). This award recognises the significant contributions of young researchers (under 35 years old) in the field of composite materials. The award ceremony took place during ECCM21, held from 2nd to 5th July in Nantes, France. The ECCM21 conference has over 1,200 attendees and features 800 paper presentations.

Dr Tan delivered a widely praised plenary talk titled 'Bridging Mechanics and Machine Learning in Composite Design and Optimisation.' His presentation received overwhelmingly positive feedback from the audience, highlighting the innovative integration of mechanics and machine learning in enhancing composite material design and optimisation processes.

With over a decade of research experience, Dr Tan is an established researcher in the fields of mechanics of composite materials, computational modelling, and multifunctional materials. He joined Queen Mary University of London as a Lecturer in January 2020 and was promoted to Senior Lecturer due to his exceptional contributions. Prior to this, Dr Tan was a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge, collaborating with renowned scholar Norman Fleck. He earned his PhD from Queen’s University Belfast under the guidance of Professor Brian Falzon between 2012 and 2016.

Dr Tan's research career includes over 40 publications in prestigious journals such as the Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids (JMPS), Extreme Mechanics Letters (EML), Composite Science and Technology (CSTE), and Composites Part A/B. His work has garnered more than 2000 citations, earning him an H-index of 20 on Google Scholar. Dr Tan has also secured over £2 million in research funding as Principal Investigator (PI), including notable grants such as the ERC Starting Grant, EPSRC New Investigator Award, and a Royal Society grant.

His outstanding contributions to the field have been recognised with several awards, including the Queen Mary Faculty Research Excellence Award, the Cambridge Bluesky Award, and the Royal Aeronautical Society Bronze Paper Award. Furthermore, Dr Tan was named among the World’s Top 2% of Scientists by Stanford University in 2023, a testament to his significant impact in the field of materials science.

Dr Tan's plenary talk at ECCM21 and his receipt of the ESCM Young Researcher Award underscore his great contributions to advancing composite material research. His work will continue to inspire and influence the scientific community, bridging the gap between traditional mechanics and modern machine-learning techniques to drive innovation in composite design and optimisation.