Biography

My research interests lie in the area of scientific computing, especially High Performance Computing (HPC), primarily in the field of computational fluid mechanics.

For the last five years members of my research group and I have been developing new or improved algorthms for modeling convection and other processes in the Earth’s mantle. This numerical methodolooy is implemented in the open source mantle convection code ASPECT, which is part of a collection of freely available open source codes that can be found at the Computational Infrastructure for Geodynamics.

Over the course of my career the vast majority of my work has involved the development and use of algorithms for modeling the interface between two materials that are subject to the equations of motion governing the flow of a fluid, such as the compressible Euler equations (i.e., gas dynamics) or the incompressible Euler or Navier-Stokes equations.

Examples of problems I have worked on include the refraction of a shock wave at the interface between two gases, the impact of two solids in the hydrostatic limit (e.g., meteorite impact), and the microscale jetting of a fluid (e.g., ink jet printing). Continuing this line of research, Jonathan Robey, who is a graduate student in our research group, is now implementing an interface tracking algorithm in ASPECT. The 2D version has just been merged into the working master branch of ASPECT on GitHub.

Try it out!