Cristopher Cecka

Lecturer in Computational Science

Cris Cecka joined IACS in July 2011 as a Lecturer and researcher, co-teaching CS205, Computing Foundations of Computational Science, and CS207, Systems Development for Computational Science. For research, he works with Hanspeter Pfister's Visual Computing Lab and is developing collaborative research with Boston University, the University of Massachusetts, and IBM. Cecka's research combines topics in high-performance computing, computational physics, and applied mathematics. His interests include the development of novel fast multipole methods for applications in boundary element formulations, high performance computing with GPUs, and applications of GPU computing for finite element and boundary element methods. He received his Ph.D. in Computational Mathematics in 2011 from Stanford University and degrees in physics and joint computer science/math from Harvey Mudd College in 2006.

David Knezevic

Lecturer in Computational Science

Before joining IACS in July 2011, David Knezevic was a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, working with Professor Anthony Patera. Before that, he attended the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and obtained a Ph.D. in numerical analysis with Professor Endre Süli. He graduated from the University of Western Australia in 2004. Knezevic's research interests are in numerical analysis and scientific computing. His research focuses on numerical discretizations of partial differential equations, with an emphasis on both theory and implementation of numerical methods. He is interested in applying numerical methods to a range of different of different continuum mechanics application areas, including fluid dynamics, heat transfer, solid mechanics and acoustics. Currently his main research interests are on model reduction of parametrized partial differential equations via the Reduced Basis method (see Research). This work was awarded an innovation grant from the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation at MIT in October 2011 and led to the creation of Akselos Inc., of which David is a founder.

Pavlos Protopapas

Lecturer in Computational Science

Pavlos Protopapas received his Ph.D. in 1996 at the University of Pennsylvania in theoretical nuclear physics. His thesis provided a solution to the Coriolis attenuation problem. He served as the associate director of the National Scalable Cluster Project (NSCP), one of the initial attempts at large scale distributing computing on a grid-like model. Protopapas is a research scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and senior scientist/project leader for the Time Series Center launched by the Harvard Initiative in Innovative Computing. His research interests lie in planetary transits, the outer solar system, photometric variability, microlensing; in computer science he is interested in large databases and data mining in astronomy, with emphasis on feature extraction, anomaly detection, and similarity searches in time series.

Alexander Wissner-Gross

Institute Fellow

Alexander D. Wissner-Gross is a Research Affiliate at the MIT Media Laboratory. He has received 102 major distinctions, authored 14 publications, been granted 9 issued, pending, and provisional patents, and founded and advised 3 technology companies, 1 of which has been acquired. In 1998, he won the USA Computer Olympiad and represented the U.S. at the International Olympiad in Informatics. In 2003, he became the last person in MIT history to receive a triple major, with bachelor's in Physics, Electrical Science and Engineering, and Mathematics, while graduating first in his class from the MIT School of Engineering. In 2007, he completed his Ph.D. in Physics at Harvard, where his research on smart matter, pervasive computing, and machine learning was awarded the Hertz Doctoral Thesis Prize. Following his Ph.D., he was named a Ziff Fellow in Computer Science at Harvard University. His work has been featured in Technology Review, Business Week, Scientific American, The New York TImes and The Wall Street Journal. Website: www.alexwg.org.

Hudong Chen

Associate
Visiting Professor, Spring 2011

Hudong Chen is currently the Chief Scientist at Burlington, MA-based Exa Corporation, a scientific software company for computational fluid dynamics applications. For more than 10 years at Exa, he has led development of core technology based on  lattice Boltzmann methods in combination with state-of-the-art turbulent modeling. The software is now  widely used in various industries. Chen earned his Ph.D. in Physics at Dartmouth College and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.