August 26, 2013
The Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics and Cockrell School of Engineering welcome Tan Bui-Thanh who joins us as an assistant professor this fall.
Before joining the department, Bui-Thanh worked at the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (ICES) as a postdoctoral fellow, a research associate and most recently, a research scientist. He spent his time at ICES conducting interdisciplinary research across different areas of computational science and applied mathematics. Since then, he has made important contributions to computational geosciences, computational electromagnetics, computational fluid dynamics, computational inverse problems, large-scale partial-differential-equation-constrained optimization, uncertainty quantification and numerical analysis.
Bui-Thanh’s current research focus is on two emerging areas: developing scalable methods for large-scale uncertainty quantification and numerical methods for exascale supercomputers.
He says the former is extremely important for computational sciences because computer modeling is often accompanied by uncertainties due to boundary conditions, physical phenomena, random fluctuations and medium properties, to name a few. Quantifying the impact of these uncertainties is crucial for more accurate computer modeling. Ultimately, this research would lead to seismic imaging of the earth’s interior, which could improve our understanding about its mantle convection, volcanic behavior and earthquakes.
Bui-Thanh says his work on numerical methods for exascale computers will provide computer simulation algorithms for the near future exascale supercomputers, allowing computational scientists to effectively utilize them to perform simulations with a factor of more than 10 times in resolution in each spatial dimension. His target application for this research is improving the speed and performance of climate modeling which will provide more accurate weather predictions.
Bui-Thanh received his PhD in 2007 in computational fluid dynamics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he also worked as a postdoctoral fellow until 2008. He received his master's degree in high performance computation for engineered systems from the Singapore-MIT Alliance and his bachelor’s degree in engineering aeronautics from Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology, Vietnam.
He will be teaching the Introduction to Computer Programming (ASE 201) during the Fall 2013 semester.
Q&A with Tan Bui-Thanh
What attracted you to The University of Texas at Austin?
The ASE/EM department is consistently ranked among the top 10 in the US. Its research in computational science and engineering has been internationally recognized. I would like to be part of this tradition and strengthen it further with my interdisciplinary research in computational engineering.
What do you find most satisfying about your work?
Success in developing new methods that solve large-scale practical problems that have not been done before.
What are your favorite hobbies outside of work?
Reading mathematics.
