Charbel Farhat is the Vivian Church Hoff Professor of Aircraft Structures, Chairman of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Professor in the Institute of Computational and Mathematical Engineering, Director of the Army High Performance Computing Research Center, and Director of the King Abdullah City of Science and Technology Center of Excellence for Aeronautics and Astronautics. He currently serves on the United States Bureau of Industry and Security's Emerging Technology and Research Advisory Committee (ETRAC) at the United States Department of Commerce, and on the United States Air Force Scientific Advisory Board (SAB). He was designated by the US Navy recruiters as a Primary Key-Influencer and flew with the Blue Angels during Fleet Week 2014.

He is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Member of the Royal Academy of Engineering (UK), a Member of the Lebanese Academy of Sciences, a designated ISI Highly Cited Author in Engineering, and a Fellow of six professional societies: the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), the International Association of Computational Mechanics (IACM), the World Innovation Foundation (WIF), the United States Association of Computational Mechanics (USACM), and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). He was knighted by the Prime Minister of France in the Order of Academic Palms and awarded the Medal of Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Academiques. He is also the recipient of several other professional and academic distinctions including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the ASME's Computers & Information in Engineering Division, the Ashley Award for Aeroelasticity and the Structures, Structural Dynamics and Materials Award from the AIAA, the Gordon Bell Prize and Sidney Fernbach Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Computer Society, the John von Neumann Medal from the USACM, the Grand Prize from the Japan Society for Computational Engineering and Science (JSCES), and the Gauss-Newton Medal from the IACM. He is also Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering, Editor of the International Journal for Numerical Methods in Fluids, and a member of the editorial boards of nine other international scientific journals. He has been an AGARD lecturer on aeroelasticity and computational mechanics at several distinguished European institutions, and a plenary or keynote speaker at numerous national and international scientific meetings. He is the author of over 400 refereed journal publications on fluid-structure interaction, computational fluid dynamics on moving grids, computational structural mechanics, computational acoustics, supercomputing, parallel processing, and model order reduction.