Yang Yan (严洋) is a Ph.D. candidate of Engineering Mechanics at Hohai University in Nanjing, China. He earned his bachelor’s degree in Engineering Mechanics at Hohai University in June 2012, defending his thesis on “Meshless boundary collocation methods for wave propagation problems”. Then he attended a 6- year Ph.D. program sponsored by Hohai University. He has also hosted a one-year project supported by Hohai University (Grant No. 2014B31414). From November 2016, he became a visiting Ph.D. student in the Mul2 research team at Politecnico di Torino advised by Prof. E. Carrera and A. Pagani, sponsored by the China Scholarship Council (CSC) (Grant No. 201606710014). His research project is related to the development of advanced structural theories for the static and dynamic behavior of composite structures coupled with semi-analytical meshless methods.