Dr. Pengzhi Pan obtained his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Engineering Mechanics and Solid Mechanics from Wuhan University of Technology, Ph.D. degree in Rock Engineering from the Institute of Rock and Soil Mechanics (IRSM), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in 2006. Then he worked at IRSM as an Assistant Professor, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2009, and Professor in 2013. In 2011-2012, he worked at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) as a Visiting Scholar in the modeling of coupled thermo-hydro-mechano-chemical (THMC) processes in geological media. His research is currently focused on experimental investigations on rock fracture mechanics and continuum-discontinuum numerical methods to simulate rock nonlinear fracturing process with and without consideration of coupled THMC processes in geological media. He developed a series of comprehensive successive numerical codes (e.g. EPCA2D, EPCA3D, RDCA, TOUGH-RDCA, which are incorporated into CASRock (www.casrock.cn)) with a combination of multidiscipline and theories.