Dr Liya Zhao

Dr Liya Zhao is currently a Senior Lecturer in the School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering at the University of New South Wales (UNSW Sydney). She is the recipient of the ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) for 2021-2024. 

Dr Liya Zhao received her PhD in Structures and Mechanics from Nanyang Technological University Singapore in Dec 2015. She joined the University of Technology Sydney in 2017 as a Lecturer and became a Senior Lecturer in 2021. She joined UNSW Sydney as a Senior Lecturer in 2022. Dr Liya Zhao was featured among the World's Top 2% Scientists list for single year 2020-2023 in the subject field of Materials, Energy, and Enabling & Strategic Technologies, published by Stanford University.     

Her research interests include energy harvesting, nonlinear dynamics, smart materials and structures, electromechanical modelling, vibration control, aerodynamics, and piezoelectric devices.

- Nonlinear Dynamics, Vibration Suppression, Metastructure/metamaterials

• Structural/material/geometric/aerodynamic nonlinearity

• Multifunctional metastructure/metamaterial systems for energy harvesting and vibration suppression

 - Kinetic Energy Harvesting

• Nonlinear adaptive structures for 1) small-scale wind energy harvesting with aeroelastic instabilities 2) broadband vibration energy harvesting 

• Advanced power extraction interfaces for energy conversion enhancement

• Human motion energy harvesting; biosensing

• Wave energy harvesting

- Smart Materials and Structures

• Adaptive devices for energy harvesting, vibration suppression, actuating and sensing

• Electromechanically coupled adaptive structures with smart materials (piezoelectric / flexoelectric / triboelectric / electret mechanisms)

- Integrated Self-Powered Wireless Sensor Networks/Active Tags

• Sustainable physiological monitoring with self-powered body sensor networks

• Sustainable smart environmental/structural health monitoring

• Sustainable object tracking