BGCE Prize Finalists In the Spotlight at CSE15

It has become a tradition: After successful sessions in Costa Mesa (2007), Miami (2009), Reno (2011), and Boston (2013), the SIAM Conference on CSE (held this year, March 14-18, in Salt Lake City, Utah) hosted the student paper competition sponsored by the Bavarian Graduate School of Computational Engineering (BGCE) for the fifth time. Open to both undergraduate and graduate students, this biannual competition recognizes and promotes outstanding student research in CSE.

This year, 24 students representing 23 research institutions in eight countries had submitted the required four-page extended abstracts. Based on the quality and relevance to CSE of those submissions, the following eight finalists were invited to present their work and results in two special sessions in Salt Lake City:

1. Jessica Bosch (Max Planck Magdeburg): Efficient solution of Cahn–Hilliard Systems
2. David Emerson (Tufts University): Advanced Discretizations and Multigrid Methods for the Energy Minimization of Liquid Crystal Equilibrium Configurations
3. Evan Gawlik (Stanford University): A High-order Finite Element Method for Moving Boundary Problems Using Universal Meshes
4. Marija Kranjčević (University of Zagreb): Towards a Hybrid Parallelization of Chebyshev Filtered Subspace Iteration
5. Dhairya Malhotra (University of Texas at Austin): A Parallel Volume Integral Equation Stokes Solver for Flows in Complex Geometries
6. Giuseppe Pitton (SISSA Trieste): Computational Reduction Strategies for Bifurcation and Stability Problems
7. Oliver Weeger (TU Kaiserslautern): Nonlinear Frequency Response Analysis of Mechanical Vibrations based on Isogeometric Discretization and Model Order Reduction
8. Mattia Zanella (University of Ferrara): Uncertainty Quantification in Control Problems for Flocking Models.

As in the previous years, the quality of the students’ contributions—both the presentations and the technical content—was excellent. The work of all this year’s finalists reflected almost perfectly our definition of CSE research; together, the speakers covered a broad range of thriving applications, state-of-the-art modeling and computational methods, and efficient tools and implementations. 

After the presentations, the members of this year’s international prize committee—Hans-Joachim Bungartz (TU München), Omar Ghattas (University of Texas at Austin),  Jan Hesthaven (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne), Esmond Ng (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory), Ulrich Rüde (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg), Peter Turner (Clarkson University), and Carol Woodward (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)—had the challenging task of selecting one winner. They based their selection of David Emerson on the following criteria: scientific depth, importance, relevance to CSE, quality of the written paper, quality of the presentation, and maturity of the work.

A student at Tufts University, Medford, Emerson works on the simulation of nematic liquid crystals, whose uses include display technologies. He derived an energy-minimization method and implemented a framework based on tailored multigrid methods for efficiently solving the linear systems. 

Emerson, accompanied by his wife, was scheduled to begin his visit to Bavaria at the beginning of July, with a one-week stay at BGCE’s two home universities, Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg and Technische Universität München. 

Having hosted four excellent BGCE Student Prize winners in Bavaria, we eagerly await David’s arrival. And we already look forward to the sixth BGCE Student Prize competition in 2017!