Xiang Zhang has worked at three UK Universities: Imperial College London for seven years as Research Associate; Cranfield University for 18 years with Lecturer, Senior Lecturer and Readership appointments; currently at Coventry University as Professor in Structural Integrity since 2015. She is a Chartered Engineer, Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society, and committee member of the Society’s Specialist Group on Materials and Structures. She has enjoyed over 30 years research on the fatigue and fracture behaviour of engineering materials and structures. In her work, achieving a failure is good news (in order to understand the material’s performance limit and design for structural integrity). She and her team are regarded as the most destructive people in the labs.          

Xiang studied aeronautical engineering at the Northwestern Polytechnical University in China (MSc) and Imperial College London (PhD on the fatigue crack behaviour of an aerospace aluminium alloy under complex variable amplitude loads). 

Her role in the NEWAM programme is to lead the Materials Performance research, interacting with the Materials Development and Non Destructive Testing teams, to achieve our research objectives.

Her hobby is yogalates.