Seung Jae Lee, PhD

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Bio

Dr. Seung Jae Lee is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and co-director of the Granular Micromechanics Research Laboratory. He also currently serves as the Undergraduate Program Director within the department. His research trajectory has evolved through a multidisciplinary background spanning architectural engineering, structural engineering, and computational granular mechanics.

Dr. Lee began his academic training in architectural engineering at Sungkyunkwan University and started his professional career as a building façade engineer at the LG Industrial Materials Research Institute. His industry experience exposed him to complex mechanical systems and sparked a deeper interest in mechanics and material behavior. He later pursued graduate studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he earned his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering with a focus on computational granular mechanics.

While formally trained in structural engineering through his graduate coursework, Dr. Lee became increasingly interested in the complex behavior of granular materials that exhibit characteristics of both solids and fluids. He was particularly drawn to the inherently multi-scale nature of these materials, where macroscopic behavior emerges from microscopic particle-scale interactions. Understanding and predicting such behavior presents significant scientific and computational challenges, because realistic simulations often require tracking millions of interacting particles simultaneously.

This interest led him toward computational granular mechanics and the development of advanced particle-scale characterization techniques and numerical methods for modeling granular material behavior across scales. Through this work, he seeks to bridge particle-scale physics with emergent system-level behavior relevant to a broad range of scientific and engineering applications. His research further integrates AI-driven frameworks and high-performance computing to establish new computational paradigms for discrete systems and materials. In addition, he explores unconventional simulation strategies inspired by physics engines originally developed for video games, such as Angry Birds, as a means to achieve efficient large-scale particle simulations while broadening the accessibility and impact of computational modeling.

Education & Experience

EDUCATION

  • Ph.D. Civil Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 2014

EXPERIENCE

  • Undergraduate Program Director, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 11/2022 - Present
  • Associate Professor (with tenure), Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 08/2020 - Present
  • Founding Faculty Fellow, STEM Transformation Institute, 01/2015 - 04/2018
  • Assistant Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 08/2014 - 08/2020

Honors & Awards

  • FIU Summer Research Enhancement Award, 2026
  • FIU Faculty Senate Award for Excellence in Service, 2025
  • FIU Rewarding Excellence in Teaching Incentives (RETI) Award, 2024
  • Editor’s Choice Award, ASCE Journal of Architectural Engineering, June 2023
  • Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award, 2016
  • Top 25 Hottest Articles, Computers and Geotechnics (Elsevier), 2012