Zirui Mao is a Research Associate at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory working in the Center for Hierarchical Waste Form Materials (CHWM) EFRC. His research focuses on the area of computational mechanics, using knowledge of mechanics, mathematics, and emerging ML algorithms to solve numerically realistic engineering problems via computer programming and HPC. He has experience in solving large deformation problems of granular materials, simulating multiphase flow through porous structures, multi-physics modeling of CFD problems, and optimal controlling of microstructure evolution with the numerical approaches including meshfree methods, phase-field method, Finite Difference method, FFT, reinforcement learning algorithm etc.  ORCID ID # 0000-0003-3223-8921.