I am a graduate student at Utah State University, currently studying mechanical engineering with an emphasis in computational engineering.  I have always been fascinated with the idea of simulating the natural world on computers.  It all started in high school when I learned Newton's law of gravitation in physics class and Euler's method in calculus.  I created a simple simulator of the earth orbiting the sun in the form of a Java applet, since at the time Java was the only language that I new.  Unfortunately, since Euler's method is globally only first order accurate and I was using real time as my time step, my simulation was not very accurate.  I have learned quite a bit about numerical simulation since then, but I still find each new problem as intriguing as that first attempt.

My masters work has primarily focused on fluid mechanics and the simulation thereof.  I find the field of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to be both challenging and interesting.  Currently I am working on a simple 2d unstructured CFD code using the finite volume method.  I have also written other fluid dynamics codes for my graduate fluids class which range from 3d vortex identification methods to boundary layer equation solvers.  Outside the field of fluid dynamics, I have written a 2d finite element analysis code which reads in a subset of the NASTRAN input file format and computes the reactions and stresses in the members.  The code also supports some thermal effects.

My research at Utah State has been varied up till now.  I created a provisioning system for a small (12 node) computing cluster which used hardware virtualization to get around a parallelization limitation in the particle image velocimitry code the lab was running. My solution cause the cluster to process data 3.2 times faster than before. I have also worked with genetic algorithms to optimize a cross dock situation in product distribution.  In addition to these, I taught some classes on Python and parallel computing at the Utah Advanced Computing Summer Institute (UACSI) in 2008.

My thesis is to add parallel io capabilities to the CFD Grid Notation System (CGNS) library.  This will be done using parallel HDF5 as a back end, and will maintain backwards compatibilities with older CGNS files.