Oxford Mathematician Kaibo Hu has won one of this year's prestigious Philip Leverhulme Prizes. The award recognises the achievement of outstanding researchers whose work has already attracted international recognition and whose future career is exceptionally promising.
Kaibo receives the prize for his work on numerical analysis, structure-preserving discretisation, Finite Element Exterior Calculus, discrete geometry and discrete topology, computational topological hydrodynamics, and numerical relativity.
Kaibo Hu is a Senior Research Fellow and Associate Professor at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, and a Royal Society University Research Fellow. His research concerns structure-preserving numerical methods and the connections between computation, geometry and topology. He works on finite element exterior calculus and finite element tensor calculus, with applications to magnetohydrodynamics, continuum mechanics, numerical relativity and geometric PDEs.
He obtained his PhD from Peking University in 2017 and subsequently held positions at the Universities of Oslo, Minnesota, Oxford and Edinburgh. At Edinburgh, he was a Reader before returning to Oxford in 2025. He leads the ERC Starting Grant project GeoFEM (Geometric Finite Element Methods). In 2026, he was invited to give the Nachdiplom lectures at ETH Zurich. He received the SIAM Computational Science and Engineering Early Career Prize in 2023 and the Stephen Smale Prize in 2026.
Each of the 30 Prize Winners receives £100,000 which can be used for any purpose to advance their research.