April 16, 2013
Aerospace engineering junior Max Bremer has been selected as the first recipient of the Graham F. Carey Scholarship in Computational Science.
The scholarship was created by the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (ICES) to honor Professor Carey’s outstanding contributions to the field. The purpose of the award is to recognize and support the studies of exceptional undergraduate students at The University of Texas at Austin who have demonstrated competency and interest in computational science and engineering. The scholarship was established by the Board of Regents of The University of Texas System on December 16, 2011 in honor of Carey, who passed away on September 16, 2011.
During his time as an ASE/EM professor for 34 years, Carey made his mark on the field of computational mechanics as both a researcher and a teacher. He was a prolific writer with over 250 papers published in journals and an author or co-author of ten books. He held the Richard B. Curran Centennial Chair in Engineering and served as Director of the Computational Fluid Dynamics Lab.
Bremer worked as a research assistant for Professor Noel Clemens during his sophomore year where he assisted with a particle image velocimetry project, participating in both hands-on research and numerical analysis.
In summer 2012, he worked at the Max Planck Institute in Magdeburg, Germany with a computational controls group where he wrote implementations to generate structured pseudospectra for descriptor systems. He also helped develop a better understanding of the effects of perturbations on system stability and worked with a variety of systems including rockets and a power network in Brazil.
Bremer has continued to gain research experience by working with Professor Clint Dawson. The duo is creating models to understand the effects of heavy rain on watersheds, or drainage areas. The data gathered from this project could ultimately save lives because it will enable forecasters to better predict rainfall-induced flooding.
He has also been accepted to the Moncrief Undergraduate Summer Internship Program for the upcoming summer. The program is designed to provide summer support for qualified undergraduate students of mathematics, science and engineering to work within one of the ICES research groups. Bremer will continue to work on storm surge modeling with Dawson.
Professor Tinsley Oden notified Bremer that he was the first recipient of the Carey scholarship during spring break.
“I was ecstatic. This is a field I’m very passionate about and I hope to pursue graduate education in,” Bremer said. “I want to spend the rest of my life doing this. It’s nice to have my calling reaffirmed.”
The Carey scholarship is given to one individual per year and comes with a $2,000 cash award and a certificate. Bremer will receive his award and certificate at the ICES Awards Ceremony this summer.
