Moore Scholars

2021

Steven Brunton

Steven Brunton's research combines machine learning with dynamical systems to model and control complex systems in fluid dynamics, with related applications in biolocomotion, optics, energy systems, and manufacturing. His lab develops machine learning optimizations that are specifically designed to learn interpretable and generalizable dynamical systems models by promoting sparsity to uncover key physical mechanisms. These techniques are also used to learn effective sensor and actuator placements and nonlinear control laws. Working with Boeing, Steven's lab has developed sparse optimization technologies that are in production on the 737, 787, and 777 manufacturing lines, with projected savings in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Steven is also passionate about teaching math to engineers as co-author of three textbooks and through his popular YouTube channel, under the moniker "eigensteve."

Steven received a BS from Caltech in mathematics with a minor in control and dynamical systems and a PhD in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton. He is a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Washington, where he is also an adjunct professor of applied mathematics and computer science, and a data science fellow at the eScience Institute.

Steven has received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) and the Army and Air Force Young Investigator Program (YIP) awards. He was also awarded the University of Washington college of engineering junior faculty and teaching awards. He is associate director for the NSF AI Institute in Dynamic Systems.

Matthew Cook

Matthew Cook is a mathematician and computer scientist with an interest in unconventional models of computation that connect to pure logic, fundamental physics, neurobiology, and chemistry. He is well-known for his 2004 proof of Stephen Wolfram's conjecture that the extraordinarily simple Rule 110 cellular automaton is Turing-complete. His doctoral thesis, entitled Networks of Relations, was completed under the guidance of Professor Shuki Bruck at Caltech. He is currently Research Group Leader, Institute for Neuroinformatics, University of Zurich and ETH, Switzerland, where his group focuses on four themes: (1) Specialized algorithms for specialized (non von-Neumann) hardware, including convolutional neural network vision algorithms on GPUs, interlacing compilers for cellular processor arrays, and learning function approximation on dedicated spiking neural network hardware; (2) Theoretical study of complexity and undecidability in alternative models of computation, including cellular automata, combinatorial games, tiling systems, and tag systems; (3) Foundations of computation in recurrent neural networks, including relational neural networks that enforce systems of constraints rather than computing functions, learning modular relational constraints from data in abstract and spiking neural network models, and relationships between these foundations and cortical computation in real brains; and (4) Automated algorithms for analyzing electron microscope images of neural tissue as part of large-scale connectomics efforts to map the brain.

2018

Stephen H. Davis

Stephen Davis is McCormick Institute Professor and Walter P. Murphy Professor of Applied Mathematics at Northwestern University. One of his research interests is fluid mechanics, with a specialization in interfacial dynamics, moving contact lines, thin films, and stability theory. Another research focus is in materials science: he explores solidification/fluid flow interactions, rapid solidification, nanowire growth, cladding of nanowires, and island formation.

Davis received his BEE, MS, and PhD from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Among his previous roles are research mathematician at the RAND Corporation, lecturer in applied mathematics at Imperial College London, and professor of mechanics at Johns Hopkins University. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Academia Europaea. Davis has been awarded the G. I. Taylor Medal by the Society of Engineering Science, the Fluid Dynamics Prize by the American Physical Society, and the Humboldt Research Award for senior research scientists.

Peter W. Voorhees

Peter Voorhees is the Frank C. Engelhart Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern University. He is also the co-director of the Northwestern-Argonne Institute of Science and Engineering and co-director of the Center for Hierarchical Materials Design.

Voorhees's research focuses on the thermodynamics and kinetics of phase transformations in materials. He has a longstanding interest in coarsening processes that can occur in two-phase mixtures and has provided both theories for coarsening phenomena and experiments that test these theories. Voorhees's group also developed the first machine that automatically produces serial sections of a material and has created the computational tools needed to both reconstruct the threedimensional structure and interpret the large data sets that are produced by such machines. Voorhees received his PhD in materials engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He has received numerous awards, including the ASM J. Willard Gibbs Phase Equilibria Award and is a fellow of several societies, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

2017

Basile Audoly

Basile Audoly's research focues on non-linear mechanics—in particular, in the mathematical and numerical analysis of structures undergoing large displacement. Currently he is developing one-dimensional models to analyze phenomena such as the buckling of viscous jets, pattern selection in biological structures, and the sudden collapse of thin elastic structures. On several occasions his mathematical analyses have offered original explanations for intriguing behaviors reported in experiments, and he has developed efficient numerical methods for slender deformable objects which have been widely adopted.

He graduated in mathematics and physics from Ecole normale supérieure in Paris and obtained his PhD from the Statistical physics laboratory at Ecole normale. He holds a senior researcher position at CNRS; as such he is a member of d'Alembert Institute of mechanics from Université Pierre et Marie Curie, and the Laboratory of solids mechanics from Ecole polytechnique.

Vahid Tarokh

Vahid Tarokh's research focuses on statistical signal processing, pseudo-randomness, free probability, aspects of model matching, prediction of multi-regime processes, rare events prediction, and limits of learning. He also has interests in limited communications control, signal processing for biology, applications of extreme value theory to scheduling, radar, sequence design, and applications of number theory to the design of distributed interferometric arrays.

He obtained his MS in Mathematics from University of Windsor in Canada, and his PhD in Electrical Engineering from University of Waterloo in Canada. He has worked at AT&T Labs-Research as a Principal Member of Technical Staff, and the Head of the Department of Wireless Communications and Signal Processing. He was an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology before joining the Harvard University faculty.

2016

Petros Koumoutsakos

Petros Koumoutsakos conducts research at the interface of simulation and data sciences with an emphasis on fundamentals and applications in the areas of fluid mechanics, life sciences, and nanotechnology. He received his diploma from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, and his first MS from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in naval architecture. He also received an MS and PhD in aeronautics and applied mathematics from Caltech. He joined ETH Zurich as Assistant Professor of Computational Fluid Dynamics, and then was named Professor of Computational Science. Later, he became the founding director of the ETH Zurich Computational Laboratory and the Zurich Graduate School in Computational Science. In addition to being a Caltech Moore Scholar, he is a fellow of the Collegium Helveticum and of the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University.

2015

James Rice

James R. Rice has joint appointments in Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Science and Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. Before joining Harvard he was a faculty member in the Division of Engineering at Brown. He received his ScB in engineering mechanics and ScM and PhD in applied mechanics from Lehigh.

Rice's earlier work addressed cracking and plastic or creep deformation in engineering metals and ceramics. His more recent research is directed toward earth and environmental problems relating to such areas as friction and rupture in earthquake and landslide processes, tsunami propagation, glacier and ice sheet dynamics, and general hydrologic phenomena involving fluid interactions in deformation, flow, and failure of earth materials. His pathinvariant J-integral methodology, originally developed with cracking of ductile metals in mind, was quickly extended to help model transitions to unstable slippage in landslides and tectonic earthquakes and has found recent applications in his ice-sheet mechanics studies of transitions from slipping to locked basal regions.

His work has been recognized through numerous awards, including the Timoshenko and Nadai Medals of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), the von Karman and Biot Medals of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the Reid Medal of the Seismological Society of America, and the Bucher Medal of the American Geophysical Union. He has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences and to foreign membership in the British Royal Society and the French Académie des Sciences, and he has received honorary doctorates from several universities.

In November 2015, Rice will receive the 2015 ASME Medal "for seminal contributions in the field of applied mechanics, particularly the J-integral method in elasticplastic fracture mechanics that has been broadly applied in mechanical engineering and related disciplines," and in early December he will receive the Sigma Xi Monie A. Ferst Award at Georgia Tech, "to recognize significant contributions to scientific research by an educator."

2014

Robert Braun

Robert Braun's research interests center on the design of advanced flight systems and technologies for planetary exploration. His research integrates aspects of conceptual design and analysis, optimization theory, technology development, modeling and simulation, and experimental validation. Through these efforts, he has advanced the state of the art of entry, descent, and landing technology and contributed to the design, development, test, and operation of both robotic and human space-flight systems. He has also been active in the development of theory and methods for multidisciplinary design, systems engineering, and optimization. He has been a Georgia Institute of Technology faculty member since 2003. He received a BS in aerospace engineering from Penn State, an MS in astronautics from the George Washington University, and a PhD in aeronautics and astronautics from Stanford University.

2012

Scott Diddams

Scott Diddams is an experimental physicist working in the fields of precision spectroscopy and metrology, nonlinear optics, and ultrafast lasers. Since 2000, Diddams has been a staff member and project leader at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). His work focuses on the development of optical frequency combs, and he has pioneered their use in optical clocks, tests of fundamental physics, novel spectroscopy in the visible and mid-infrared, precision metrology, and ultralow noise frequency synthesis. Diddams received his PhD from the University of New Mexico in 1996. From 1996 through 2000, he did postdoctoral work at a joint institute of the University of Colorado at Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology called JILA. In 1998, Diddams was awarded a National Research Council fellowship to work at JILA with Dr. John Lewis Hall on the development and use of optical frequency combs. With JILA colleagues, he built the first self-referenced, octave-spanning optical frequency comb and used it to demonstrate carrier-envelope phase stabilized pulses, as well as carry out direct optical-to-microwave measurements. Diddams is also a recipient of the Department of Commerce gold and silver medals for "revolutionizing the way frequency is measured" as well as the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering (PECASE) for his work on optical frequency combs. He is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America and the American Physical Society.

Peter Schmid

Peter Schmid's research interests lie in computational fluid dynamics, in particular in hydrodynamic stability theory and flow control. His current efforts focus on the description and targeted manipulation of flow behavior in complex geometries. Applications range from control of instabilities to suppression of noise amplification, from techniques for mixing enhancement to designs with reduced flow sensitivities. The tools to accomplish these objectives originate from control theory, model reduction algorithms, system identification techniques, iterative linear algebra, and optimization. In addition, he is interested in quantitative flow analysis and the extraction of coherent flow structures from experimental or numerical data sequences, including their use in low-order representations for control purposes.

Schmid is currently a research director with the French National Research Agency (CNRS) and Professor of Mechanics at the École Polytechnique in Paris. Previously, he held a faculty position in applied mathematics at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, an Overseas Fellow of Churchill College (Cambridge University), and the recipient of the French "Chaire d'excellence" award and the Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship. He received his PhD in mathematics from MIT and his engineer's degree in aeronautics and astronautics from the Technical University Munich.

2010

Eric Mjolsness

Eric Mjolsness has research interests in biological modeling, including computational and mathematical methods for building useful, but complex scientific models, with applications to cellular, developmental, neural, and evolutionary biology. His current efforts center on modeling languages suitable for the computational investigation of "morphodynamics," the local dynamics of form in biology and elsewhere. Related research interests include gene regulation networks, biological image analysis, computer algebra, stochastic dynamics, stochastic process semantics, and nonlinear optimization.

Mjolsness is a Professor at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) in the Computer Science department with a joint appointment in Mathematics. He is also Director of the Center for Computational Morphodynamics at UCI; program leader for Systems Biology at the UCI Institute for Genomics and Bioinformatics; an action editor for Neural Computation; and has been a long-time Visiting Associate at Caltech. He co-organized the 2009 Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics mini-program on "Morphodynamics of plants, animals, and beyond." Previous experience includes positions at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, UC San Diego, Yale University, and a Ph.D. in Physics from Caltech. His hobbies include camping and amateur astronomy.

2009

Linda Nazar

Professor Nazar's research is aimed at investigating the mixed ion and electron transport properties of materials. She is at the helm of a multidisciplinary group studying the solid state electrochemistry of inorganic materials, with a specific focus on structural and physical property studies of nano-structured materials for energy storage and conversion. Devices include lithium-ion batteries, sodiumion batteries, supercapacitors and fuel cells. Innovative approaches to new materials synthesis are combined with device fabrication of cells and in-situ physical characterization of electrochemical processes within electrodes. Currently major efforts are being invested in developing nanoporous architectures for electrode assembly, and in-situ probes of electrode-electrolyte interfaces.

Nazar received her Honors BSc degree from the University of British Columbia, and PhD degree in Chemistry from the University of Toronto (1986). She was a post-doctoral fellow at Exxon Corporate Research Laboratories in Annandale, New Jersey, where she worked on solid state materials and electrochemistry. She is full professor and senior Canada Research Chair in Solid State Materials at the University of Waterloo in Canada, and holds joint appointments in the Departments of Chemistry and Electrical Engineering. Nazar is a recipient of the 2009 Electrochemical Society Battery Division Research Award.

Andrew Hanson

Fazle Hussain

2007

Lyle N. Long

Professor Long has performed research in several areas of computational physics, including rarefied gas dynamics, turbulence, detonations, aeroacoustics, massively parallel computing, and neural networks. He is especially interested in developing massively parallel spiking neural networks for air- and groundbased mobile robot vision systems based on biological networks. He is a Distinguished Professor of Aerospace Engineering, Bioengineering and Mathematics at The Pennsylvania State University. He was founding Editor-in-Chief of the AIAA Journal of Aerospace Computing, Information, and Communication, and is also founder and Director of the Computational Science Graduate Minor program at Penn State.

He received a Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering with Distinction from the University of Minnesota (1976), a Master of Science in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Stanford University (1978), and a Doctor of Science from George Washington University (1983). He is a Fellow of the AIAA, and he has authored or co-authored more than 200 technical papers.

2006

Krishna V. Palem

Krishna V. Palem is professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and professor of Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is a leader in embedded systems research, and founding director of CREST, the Center for Research in Embedded Systems and Technology. The research mission of CREST is to develop compiler-centric software and hardware/software co-design to aid the programmer to rapidly prototype embedded applications.

Palem has played an active role in enabling a community of research in embedded and hybrid systems internationally through invited and keynote lectures, conference organization and participation as well as editorial contributions to journals. He serves on the editorial board of the ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems. With Guang Gao, he started the Compilers, Architectures and Synthesis for Embedded Systems (CASES) workshop series in 1998. Since then, this workshop has blossomed into a thriving international conference sponsored by ACM SIGs.

From 1986 to 1994, Palem was a member of the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. He was a Schonbrunn visiting professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, where he was recognized for excellence in teaching, and has held visiting positions at the National University and Nanyang Technological University of Singapore. He is a fellow of the ACM and the IEEE.

2005

Herbert Edelsbrunner

Herbert Edelsbrunner is Arts and Sciences Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics at Duke University. He graduated from the Graz University of Technology, Austria, in 1982 and was with the Department of Computer Science at Urbana-Champaign from 1985 through 1999. His research areas are algorithms, computational geometry and topology, and structural molecular biology. Edelsbrunner specializes in the combination of computing and advanced mathematics to solve problems in applications. His methodology is to search out the mathematical roots of application problems and to combine mathematical with computational structure to get working solutions.

Edelsbrunner has published two textbooks in the general area of computational geometry and topology. In 1991, he received the Alan T. Waterman Award from the National Science Foundation. In 1996 he co-founded Raindrop Geomagic, a company focusing on sophisticated 3D geometric modeling software, and serves on its Board of Directors.

Yannis Kevrikides

Part of Yannis Kevrekidis' research is in the area of nonlinear dynamics, spatiotemporal pattern formation, and its control in engineering systems. The emphasis is in the development of scientific computing tools for capturing instabilities, bifurcations, and invariant manifolds. This work links naturally with system identification and model reduction; during the last few years Kevrekidis' group has used such tools to develop a "systems-based" approach to complex, multiscale system modeling and computation. This "equation-free" approach links traditional continuum numerical analysis algorithms with microscopic/atomistic simulation codes (MD, kMC, Brownian dynamics, homogenization, agent-based modeling).

Kevrekidis received a Dipl.Eng. in Chemical Engineering in 1982 from the NTU in Athens, Greece; his MA in Mathematics and PhD in Chemical Engineering are from the University of Minnesota (1986). He is a Professor of Chemical Engineering and of Applied and Computational Mathematics at Princeton, as well as an associated faculty member of the Mathematics Department there.

2004

Sandra M. Troian

Professor Troian's research interests are in high-resolution lithography by microscale contact printing; microfluidic delivery systems using micropatterned thermocapillary flow; boundary conditions for liquid on solid flows; rivulet instabilities in driven spreading films; onset and evolution of digitated structures in spreading surfactant films; and slip behavior and foam stabilization in polymer-surfactant films.

Troian is a Professor of Chemical Engineering at Princeton University, and is also an affiliated faculty member in the Departments of Physics, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and Applied and Computational Mathematics. Sandra Troian received her Bachelor's degree in Physics from Harvard University in 1980, a Master's in Physics at Cornell University in 1984, and her PhD in Physics from Cornell University in 1987.

Subra Suresh

Professor Suresh's interests are in nanoscale mechanical properties of engineering and biological materials, and in the connections among structure, properties and function. He is the author/coauthor of two books, Fatigue of Materials and Thin Film Materials, both of which have been published by Cambridge University Press; coauthor of nearly 200 journal publications; and coinventor in approximately 15 patent applications. He has been elected a member of the U. S. National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of ASME, TMS, ASM and the American Ceramic Society, and an Honorary Member of the Materials Research Society of India. He has previously held the R. P. Simmons Professorship at MIT, the Clark B.Millikan Visiting Professorship at Caltech, and the Swedish National Chair in Engineering at the Royal Institute of Technology.

Suresh received a Bachelor of Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology in 1977, an MS degree from Iowa State University in 1978, and an ScD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981, all in Mechanical Engineering.

2003

George Papanicolaou

Professor Papanicolaou's interests are in waves and diffusion in inhomogeneous or random media and in the mathematical analysis of multiscale phenomena that arise in their study. Applications come from electromagnetic wave propagation in the atmosphere, underwater sound, waves in the lithosphere, diffusion in porous media, etc. He has studied both linear and nonlinear waves and diffusion, in both direct and inverse problems. Papanicolaou is now working on assessing multi-pathing effects in communication systems, especially when time-reversal arrays are used.

Another recent interest is financial mathematics, especially the use of asymptotics for stochastic equations in analyzing complex models of financial markets and in data analysis.

Papanicolaou received a BEE from Union College in Schenectady, N.Y. in 1965, and his PhD in Mathematics from New York University, Courant Institute in 1967.

Bernard Yurke

Dr. Yurke has been working at the forefront of physics in a number of areas, including low-temperatures physics, quantum optics, liquid crystals, biophysics, and MEMs devices. His current main interest is in constructing nano structures and nanodevices using DNA. Past research projects have included the generation and detection of squeezed states at optical and microwave frequencies, the study of phase-ordering kinetics in liquid crystals, and force generation of microtubules.Yurke also is active in the development of quantum measurement schemes with phonons in nanostructures, and mechanical quanta in ultraminiature mechanical devices.

Yurke received BS (1975) and MA (1976) degrees in Physics from the University of Texas at Austin, and his PhD (1983) in Physics from Cornell University. Since 1982 he has been a researcher at Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies in both the Optical Physics and Materials Research Departments. He has been a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff at Bell Labs since 1987.

Eli Yablonovitch

Professor Yablonovitch's research focuses on optoelectronics, high-speed optical communications, nanocavity lasers, photonic crystals at optical and microwave frequencies, quantum computing, and communication.

Yablonovitch graduated with the PhD degree in Applied Physics from Harvard University in 1972. He worked for two years at Bell Telephone Laboratories, and then became a professor of Applied Physics at Harvard. In 1979 he joined Exxon to do research on photovoltaic solar energy. Then in 1984, he joined Bell Communications Research, where he was a Distinguished Member of Staff and also Director of Solid-State Physics Research. In 1992 he joined the University of California, Los Angeles where he is Professor of Electrical Engineering.