Dr. Cheng Zhang is an incoming assistant professor in civil engineering at Rowan University. He is currently a postdoctoral research associate in the Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at Princeton University and Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL). His research is centered on coastal hazards and oceanography, with a primary focus on developing cutting-edge, AI-enhanced deterministic and probabilistic tools to assess and mitigate risks from nature hazards in coastal communities. Prior to Princeton University and GFDL, he was a postdoctoral scholar in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University until 2021, and obtained his PhD in 2020 in Civil Engineering from the Center for Applied Coastal Research at University of Delaware. He is a major contributor to various well-established open-source models, including the ocean circulation model MOM6, 3D non-hydrostatic wave model NHWAVE, and 2D phase resolving wave model FUNWAVE.