MRIs, Facebook, and Autonomous Vehicles Benefit from Data Scientist Rachel Ward's "New Math" for Everyday Life

A surprising amount of everyday life is governed by advanced mathematics. Aside from the motion of atoms or the rotation of the stars, complex mathematical methods guide social media feeds, medical imaging, and self-driving vehicles.

Rachel Ward, associate professor of mathematics and a data scientist at The Oden Institute, looks for those mathematical solutions that aid everyday life. She applies math in new ways for varied purposes: to rigorously justify existing methods for solving practical problems; to find faster or more accurate solutions to solve them; or to find solutions where none currently exist. Read more.

March 28, 2019

Oden Institute Renaming Honors Founder and Tireless Computational Engineering & Sciences Champion J. Tinsley Oden

The University of Texas System Board of Regents voted unanimously at their Feb. 13 meeting to recognize the "leadership and generous support" of the Institute's Founding Director J. Tinsley Oden. In his honor, the Institute was renamed the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences.

An event celebrating the new name is being planned for late spring.

"As members of ICES, past and present, each one of us has been personally touched by Dr. Oden's vision, passion, leadership, and dedication. I could not be prouder to be the director of the Oden Institute," said Karen Willcox, who was selected to direct the Institute when Tinsley Oden stepped back into full time research in 2018. Read more.

Feb. 14, 2019

Simulations Show Enlarged Prostate Could Stop Tumor Growth

For men older than about 60, an enlarged prostate means feeling the urge to make a pit stop way too often throughout the day.

But a new study shows that if these men also happen to have prostate cancer, the larger prostate actually impedes tumor growth.

The findings suggest that it might be a bad idea to downsize an enlarged prostate through surgery or drugs, because doing so could lead to faster growth of prostate cancer. While the five-year survival rate for prostate cancer is generally very high, it is still one of the leading causes of death among men in the U.S., according to the Prostate Cancer Foundation. Read more.

Feb. 5, 2019

Tan Bui Earns Prestigious 2019 NSF CAREER Award

Many areas of science and engineering try to predict how an object will respond to a stimulus — how earthquakes propagate through the Earth or how a tumor will respond to treatment. This is difficult even when you know exactly what the object is made of, but how about when the object’s structure is unknown?

The class of problems that deals with such cases is known as inverse modeling. Based on information often gleaned at the surface — for instance, from ultrasound devices or seismometers — inverse modeling tries to determine what lies below, whether it is the size of a tumor or a fault in the Earth. Read more.

Jan. 29, 2019

Sack's New Heart Valve Modeling Technique Enables Customized Medical Care for Patients

ICES Professor Michael Sack's research team has developed a new noninvasive technique for simulating repairs to the heart’s mitral valve with levels of accuracy reliable enough for use in a clinical setting. Mitral valve (MV) disease is one of the most common valve-related heart conditions, newly diagnosed in 5 million Americans each year. Left unchecked, MV disease can lead to heart failure and/or stroke. This advance in computational modeling technology allows surgeons to provide patient-specific treatments, a development that will improve the long-term efficacy of current medical approaches. Read more.

Jan. 29, 2019