Professor Charlie C.L. Wang is internationally recognised for pioneering geometry-driven intelligence for design and manufacturing, establishing geometric computing and optimisation as foundations for intelligent engineering design and advanced manufacturing. His research transforms geometry from a passive representation into an active computational mechanism for integrating design, optimisation and fabrication. By incorporating manufacturability, structural performance, material behaviour, machine kinematics and process constraints into computational design, his work enables new capabilities in multi-axis and vector additive manufacturing, hybrid manufacturing, robotic fabrication and high-performance composite printing.

A distinctive feature of Professor Wang's research is its translation from computational methods into engineering software and manufacturing practice. Field-based geometric computing techniques developed through his research have been translated into 5XCAM, an automated CAM platform co-developed by 5AXISWORKS and Professor Wang's Digital Manufacturing Lab for multi-axis manufacturing. His research on graded-density continuous infill, CrossFill, has also been translated into the CuraEngine ecosystem through UltiMaker Cura. His more recent research on curved slicing, vector 3D printing and performance-aware toolpath generation is creating further pathways towards industrial implementation in advanced additive manufacturing.

Professor Wang is Chair in Smart Manufacturing at The University of Manchester, where he founded and directs the Digital Manufacturing Lab and holds an EPSRC Open Fellowship (2023-2028) on Field Computation Based Kernel for Vector 3D Printing. Before joining Manchester in 2020, he was Professor and Chair of Advanced Manufacturing at Delft University of Technology and Professor of Mechanical and Automation Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

His contributions have received significant international recognition, including ACM SIGGRAPH Asia Best Paper Awards in 2022 and 2025, the ASME CIE Excellence in Research Award (2016) and the University of Manchester Distinguished Achievement Medal - Researcher of the Year (2026). He is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), the Hong Kong Institution of Engineers (HKIE) and the Solid Modeling Association (SMA), and served as Chair of SMA from 2021 to 2024.

His research interests span Digital Manufacturing, Computational Design, Additive Manufacturing, Robotic Fabrication, Soft Robotics, Geometric Computing and Computer Graphics, with a particular focus on integrating geometry, engineering optimisation, computational intelligence and physical manufacturing into intelligent design-to-fabrication systems.