Chairholder Profile

Yong Zeng

Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering
Concordia University

Chair title

NSERC Chair in Aerospace Design Engineering (NCADE)

Chair program

Chairs in Design Engineering Program

Role

Associate Chairholder since 2015

Summary

The chair’s research program aims to understand and improve creative design activities in aerospace engineering. This research crosses many disciplines, including engineering design, artistic creation, computer science, management science, linguistics, neurocognitive science, mathematical science, and epistemology. The chair has proposed a new design theory and methodology, called environment-based design. Specific topics of the chair’s research include the science of design, a methodology for innovative and creative design, a neurocognitive model of design creativity, computer-aided conceptual design, and the interplay between linguistics and design creativity.

In this Chair program, Dr. Zeng will focus on improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the undergraduate and graduate engineering student training, while developing and validating innovative methodologies directly applicable to aerospace design and development by applying his expertise in design research. These new processes and methodologies can support the delivery of the right product at the right time in the unique context of the aerospace industry. The program will explore the following four research tasks:

• to assess students’ mental model in learning aerospace design, i.e., how students use their existing knowledge and skills to acquire aerospace design knowledge and skills;
• to model typical design processes implemented in the aerospace industry, i.e., the mental workload for aerospace engineering learning and teaching;
• to develop new design methodologies to further improve students’ aerospace design capacity through advanced skills built on state-of-the-art design methodologies;
• to develop innovative approaches and improve the existing curriculum for training students in aerospace design knowledge and skills as well as new methodologies.

By integrating undergraduate teaching and learning with the practising aerospace community, this research provides an iterative and continuous improvement process characterized by strategy development and reform, implementation, evaluation, and feedback on curriculum and teaching. Through this Chair program, the cycle time to train new graduate students to be capable aerospace design engineers is expected to be greatly shortened.

Partners

• Bombardier Aerospace Inc.
• Pratt & Whitney Canada
• Bell Helicopter Textron Canada
• Siemens Canada Limited
• Altair Engineering
• Marinvent Corporation

Contact information

Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering
Concordia University

Email: zeng@ciise.concordia.ca

Website:
 http://www.concordia.ca/encs/info-systems-eng/faculty.html?fpid=yong-zeng