Profile

Xia Yan is a Tenure-Track Associate Professor in the School of Civil Engineering at Central South University. His research activities focus on the fire performance of high-strength cold-formed thin-walled steel structures, structural thermal-mechanical analysis, and performance-based fire design methods for resilient infrastructure under fire conditions.

Prior to joining Central South University in 2025, Xia was a project consultant in the Engineering Mechanics and Infrastructure division at Simpson Gumpertz & Heger (SGH), a renowned U.S. engineering consulting firm, from 2022 to 2025. He is a registered Professional Engineer (PE) in Nevada. At SGH, his work included structural evaluation of safety-related structures in a nuclear power plant, structural fire analyses of critical infrastructure, and advanced finite element analysis of structures under various loading conditions. 

Xia earned his Ph.D. in 2022 from Johns Hopkins University, where he studied under Professor Thomas Gernay, a leading authority in structural fire engineering. His doctoral research developed new temperature-dependent material property models and performance-based design methodologies for cold-formed steel structural subjected to fire.

Xia has published in journals such as Engineering Structures and Thin-Walled Structures, and his findings have been incorporated into the ANSI/AISI S100-2024 cold-formed steel design standard. Xia’s honors include a full scholarship from Johns Hopkins University, the AISI Small Project fellowship, and an Honorable-Mention for Best Innovative Paper from the Cold-Formed Steel Research Consortium (CFSRC). He also serves as a peer reviewer for Fire Safety Journal and Fire Technology.

Email: xiayan@csu.edu.cn

Research Interests:

• Performance-based structural fire design

• Structural fire design for advanced high-strength cold-formed steel structures

• Fire risk assessment and resilience enhancement of infrastructure