Professor, AIAA Associate Fellow
Director, McGill Institute for Aerospace Engineering
Department of Mechanical Engineering
McGill University
817 Sherbrooke Street West, Room MD151
Montreal, QC H3A 0C3, Canada
Tel: (514) 398-5757
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Graduate Students
Graduate Students
Zineb Bahri (Masters)
I am currently pursuing a MSc in Mechanical Engineering at McGill University as a McCall-MacBain Scholar. I completed my undergraduate degree in General Engineering at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco. Under the supervision of Prof. Nadarajah, I am currently part of a research project that aims to optimize the aerodynamic efficiency and acoustics of aerodynamic profiles.
Mathias Dufresne-Piché (Masters)
I am a U4 mechanical engineering student at McGill University. I completed my honours thesis within the Computational Aerodynamics Group and will start my Master's degree in Fall 2025. My work focuses on extending the classical Von Neumann Analysis framework to non-linear flux reconstruction schemes. The underlying objective of this research is to further characterize the stability behaviour of non-linearly stable schemes. I am a mathematics enthusiast and I enjoy running and canoeing.
Vishnu Narasimhan (Doctoral)
In the pursuit of efficiency and emissions, people have been actively researching techniques to enforce a laminar boundary layer over aerodynamic surfaces to reduce the skin-friction drag. However, over the past decade, very few have been able to implement it in a real world design; the Boeing 787 has laminar flow over its nacelles, while the 737MAX has NLF wingtips and Airbus with laminar flow wings in their BLADE project. This is because, laminar boundary layers are incredibly unstable and require a careful profile design and specific flow conditions to maintain stability and delay transition to turbulent boundary layers. For commercial air-crafts two modes of transition are of great interest- Natural Transition and Crossflow transition. Traditionally, these modes have been modelled with a semi-physical model based on linear stability that is non-local and difficult to parallelize, making it tricky to implement efficiently in most CFD codes. We use a fully-local, versatile model instead, in a parallel unstructured flow solver, to predict Natural or Crossflow induced transitional onset in real-world flows. To be able to efficiently obtain NLF designs of aerodynamics surfaces, we aim to couple the model to a discrete adjoint gradient-based optimization framework. However, in complex unstructured grids, such a coupling can result in a highly ill-conditioned system that can prove difficult to solve using traditional iterative methods, even with Newton-Krylov methods. We therefore are investigating various iterative techniques to obtain a robust and efficient way to solve the optimization problem.
Aditya Nemana (Doctoral)
I am currently working on a project titled, “Matrix-free preconditioners for Newton-Krylov methods for Large Eddy Simulations” supervised by Prof. Nadarajah as a doctoral student. Preconditioners play a vital role in the convergence of Newton-Krylov methods. For large-scale problems, it is very difficult to get convergence using Netwon-Krylov methods without properly preconditioning the Jacobian matrix. Therefore, preconditioning the system is a necessity. The popular preconditioners currently in use need explicit formation of Jacobian matrices which is costly when it comes to storage. This is where the matrix-free preconditioning comes in handy. My current research goal is to obtain matrix-free preconditioners and to apply them in a matrix-free fashion (i.e., relying on matrix-vector products only) in an asynchronous manner. My love for applied mathematics drove me towards this project. As a long-term goal, I wish to be a professor someday. In my free time, I am an avid consumer of stories of any kind (books, movies, TV shows, anime etc.) and I like to write my thoughts as poems sometimes.
Tyson Ofstie (Masters)
Coming from the University of Alberta, with an Undergraduate in Mechanical Engineering, I am now in a M.Sc. program for Mechanical engineering at McGill. For my research, I am working on methods to reduce the number of variables needed to solve systems that are slightly different to those that are already solved. These systems often take much longer the more variables there are. Therefore, there is a lot of interest in reducing the number of variables and to make the computations much faster. This can have practical applications such as the changing of the shape of a car for aesthetics and how it affects the drag force on the vehicle. Other than school, I enjoy cross-country skiing, downhill skiing, and running.
Carolyn Pethrick (Doctoral)
Carolyn is currently pursuing a M.Sc. with the Computational Aerodynamics group. Her research interests are in higher-order entropy-stable temporal discretization. By ensuring that the time-stepping method maintains entropy stability, the group will be able to perform fully discrete entropy stable aerodynamics simulations, allowing for higher accuracy and better stability than previously possible. Her research has applications in fields such as turbulence, supersonic aerodynamics, and turbomachinery. Carolyn recently graduated from the University of Calgary with a B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering specializing in Energy and Environmental Engineering. Outside of her academic interests, Carolyn enjoys spending her free time hiking and backpacking in the Canadian outdoors.
Dominic Roy (Masters)
Dominic is a Master’s student within the Computational Aerodynamics Group. After a short time in the manufacturing industry, he decided to follow his passion and pursue a master’s degree in the aerospace field. His current work is on the development and application of high-order methods for Large Eddy Simulation, with a particular focus on the industrialization of the methods for industry. Originally from New Brunswick, Dominic enjoys cooking and gastronomy, reading and listening to music in his free time.
Shruthi Srinivasan (Doctoral)
A recent graduate of the BASc program in Honours Mechatronics Engineering at the University of Waterloo, Shruthi is now pursuing a MSc degree at McGill University with the Computational Aerodynamics Group. Her current research interests are in the field of computational aeroacoustics with a focus on limiter functions.
Pranshul Thakur (Doctoral)
Adaptive mesh adaptation techniques for higher order methods is a promising field to improve efficiency and robustness of numerical algorithms. As Industrial CFD applications typically focus on evaluating a quantity of interest (lift or drag), I work on goal-oriented mesh adaptation. In particular, my work focusses on developing techniques to generate isotropic/anisotropic hp meshes for the discontinuous galerkin high order framework optimized to predict a quantity of interest.
Undergraduate Students
Undergraduate Students
Stephen Chang
I am a U2 Mechanical Engineering student at McGill. My work involves investigating complex turbulent flows over 3D aerodynamic surfaces.
Jocelyn Poon
I am a U3 Mechanical Engineering student at McGill University. My current work involves implementing low-storage Runge-Kutta methods with an automatic error-based step size control to improve computational efficiency.
Nuowei Shi
I am a U4 undergraduate student in Mechanical Engineering at McGill University, currently working on my honours thesis within the McGill Computational Aerodynamics Group. My thesis focuses on integrating Lp-CVT mesh generation into full-space mesh adaptation, aiming to improve stability during the mesh optimization process. Outside of academics, my greatest interests are watching Formula One and cycling.
Recent Alumni (Graduate Students and Post-Doctoral Fellows)
Recent Alumni (Graduate Students and Post-Doctoral Fellows)
Julien Brillon
Ph.D. Student: 2020-2025
Thesis Title: High-Order Nonlinearly Stable Flux Reconstruction Schemes for Large Eddy Simulation
Current Position: BRP Inc., Computational Fluids Engineering, Linked-In
Alex Cicchino
Ph.D. Student: 2020-2024
Thesis Title: Weight-Adjusted Nonlinearly Stable Flux Reconstruction High-Order Methods for Compressible Flows in Curvilinear Coordinates
Current Position: Post-Doctoral Fellow, Centre for Turbulence Research, Stanford University, Linked-In
Chun Kit Calvin Li
Ph.D. Student: 2022-2024
Thesis Title: Boundary Treatment for Anisotropic All-Quad Mesh Adaptation through an Lp-CVT Approach
Current Position: Aerospace Engineer,Pratt & Whitney, Linked-In
Calista Biondic
MSc. Student: 2022-2024
Thesis Title: A Goal-Oriented Adaptive Sampling Procedure for Projection-Based Reduced-Order Models with Hyperreduction.
Current Position: Ph.D. Student @ Texas-Austin. Linked-In
Liki Ramos Matsuyama
MSc. Student: 2022-2024
Thesis Title: High-order discontinuous galerkin methods for multi-species flows.
Current Position: Ph.D. Student @ JAXA
Doug Shi-Dong
Ph.D. Student: 2019-2024
Thesis Title: Full-Space Aerodynamic Shape Optimization
Current Position: R&D Engineer, ANSYS Linked-In
Erwan Lambert
MSc. Student: 2021-2023
Thesis Title: An L2-Error Estimate of Energy Stable Flux Reconstruction Method.
Current Position:
Ingénierie mécanique alternateur, simulation ventilation (PRT), ANDRITZ Hydro Canada Linked-In
Donovan Blais
MSc. Student: 2020-2022
Thesis Title: Goal-Oriented Adaptive Sampling Procedure for Projection-Based Reduced-Order Models for Aerodynamic Flows.
Current Position: Performance Analyst at Pratt & Whitney Canada Linked-In
Yao Jiang
Ph.D. Student: 2017-2021
Thesis Title: Grid Adaptation for Large Eddy Simulation Using Feature-based and Goal-oriented Error Estimators
Current Position: Senior Software Engineer, Reverb Linked-In
Damien Mancy
MSc. Student: 2019-2021
Thesis Title: Sparse approximate inverse preconditioning for highly parallel implicit solvers in computational fluid dynamics
Current Position:
R&D Software Developer, SimActive Inc. Linked-In
Aditya Kashi
Ph.D. Student: 2016-2020
Thesis Title: Asynchronous fine-grain parallel iterative solvers for computational fluid dynamics
Current Position: Computer Scientist, Oak Ridge National Labs. Linked-In
Chih-Hao Chen
Nicolas Ringue
Ph.D. Student: 2014-2019
Thesis Title: An Optimization-Based Approach to Mesh-Polynomial Adaptation of High-Order Discretizations
Current Position: Ingénieur développement logiciel chez Stilog I.S.T. Linked-In
Alumni (Graduate Students and Post-Doctoral Fellows)
Alumni (Graduate Students and Post-Doctoral Fellows)
Oliver Guy (BSc. 2024)
Alexander Fricker (BSc. 2023)
Cole Bradley (BSc. 2023)
Maya Tatarelli (BSc. 2022, Currently MSc. Physics, McGill)
Nicolas Sargi (MEng. 2022)
Samantha Zielinski (MEng 2021, Pratt&Whitney Inc.)
Peter Wojdylo (MEng 2021, Leonardo Electronics Inc.)
Stephen Metcalfe (Post-Doctoral Scholar 2021)
Liu Yang (PhD 2020, )
Mostafa Najafiyazdi (PhD 2020, Siemens - MAYA Heat Transfer)
David Brown (Post-Doctoral Scholar 2018, ANSYS)
Marc Benoit (MEng 2018, CAE Inc.)
Samuel Quaegebeur (MEng 2018, PhD Candidate Lyon)
Philip Zwanenburg (PhD 2018)
Krishna Magar (MEng 2016)
Pierre-Olivier Tardiff (MEng 2015, CAE Inc.)
Jeremy Schembri (MEng 2016, Pratt&Whitney)
François Bisson (MEng 2014, Bombardier Aerospace)
Benjamin Walther (PhD 2014, GE Engines Munich)
Brian Vermeire (PhD 2014, Assistant Professor Concordia University)
Jean-Sébastien Cagnone (PhD 2013, CENAERO)
Peyman Khayatzadeh (PhD 2013, Maya Technologies)
Ali Mosahebi (PhD 2012, ANSYS)
Vincent Poirier (MEng 2011, Bombardier Aerospace)
Arash Mousavi (PhD 2011, Bombardier Aerospace)
Robert Ritlop (MEng 2009, Bombardier Aerospace)
Kaveh Mohamed (PhD 2009, GE Global Research Center)
Olivier Soucy (MEng 2009, CAE Inc.)
Charles Tatossian (MEng 2008, Bombardier Aerospace)
Kunio Nakakita (MEng 2007, Honda Aerospace)
Farid Kachra (Meng 2006)
Constantin Bucur (MEng 2005, Boeing Seattle)
Liangkan Zheng (MEng 2005)
Alumni (Undergraduate Students)
Alumni (Undergraduate Students)
Jonah Dalfen (2024, BEng Summer SURE)
Calvin Li (2021, MSc. McGill)
Pranshul Thakur (2021, MSc. McGill)
Sepher Moalemi (2021)
Auran Yang (2020)
Nicolas Dhers (2020)
Danil Lisus (2020, MSc. McGill)
Abtin Ameri (2020, Caltech)
Emily Bonomo (2020, )
Alex Cicchino (2020, McGill)
Wensi Peng (2020, BMO)
Vassili Korotkine (2019, McGill)
Manmeet Bhabra (2018, MIT)
Cem Germezano (2017, McGill)
Alice Brais (2017, UBC)
Marc Quesnel (2017)
Matthieu Labaudiniere (2016, SpaceX)
Tristan Montoya (2026, UTIAS)
Natalie Winger (2015, Waterloo)
Omar Mbareche (2015, Pratt&Whitney)
Doug Shi-Dong (2015, McGill)
Jiajun Wang (2015, CAE Inc.)
Philip Zwanenburg (2014, McGill)
Arthur Paul-Dubois-Taine (2013, Stanford)
Benjamin Blake (2013, Stanford)
Emmet Padway (2013, University of Wyoming)
Dylan Jude (2012, University of Maryland)
Levon Atoyan (2011, Cornell)
Philip Caplan (2011, MIT)
Karen Bodie (2010, EPFL)
Matthew Claude (2010, McGill)
Zouhair Mahboubi (2008, Stanford)
Cyrus Foster (2008, Stanford)
Patrice Castonguay (2007, Stanford)
Olivier Soucy (2007, McGill-CAE)
Charles Tatossian (2006, McGill-Bombardier Aerospace)
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