University of Texas at Austin

Oden Institute Governance

The Oden Institute Leadership Team directs the administration of the organization. It is guided by three boards: the Institute Advisory Board, the Policy Board, and the Board of Visitors. The make-up of the Institute is shown in the organizational chart.

Oden Institute Senior Leadership

Karen E. Willcox

Karen E. Willcox

Director

Maria Stanzione

Maria Stanzione

Associate Director, Business Planning and Operations

Robert Moser

Robert Moser

Deputy Director

Fátima Zago Bridgewater

Fátima Zago Bridgewater

Associate Director, Research Administration and HR

Leszek F. Demkowicz

Leszek F. Demkowicz

Assistant Director, representing the Cockrell School of Engineering

William Beckner

William Beckner

Assistant Director, representing the College of Natural Sciences

Institute Advisory Board

Institute Advisory Board

The Oden Institute Advisory Board (IAB) comprises twenty-nine members of the Core Faculty, the Oden Institute Associate Director – Business Planning and Operations, and the Executive Director of the Texas Advanced Computing Center. The function of the IAB is to advise the Director on matters affecting the operations of the Institute and to assist the Institute administration in meeting its various obligations and in achieving its mission. The current IAB members include the following:

Narayana Aluru, Mechanical Engineering

Todd Arbogast, Mathematics

Chandrajit L. Bajaj, Computer Science

William Beckner, Mathematics

George Biros, Mechanical Engineering

Fátima Zago Bridgewater, Oden Institute

James R. Chelikowsky, Physics & Chemical Engineering

Clint N. Dawson, Aerospace Engineering & Engineering Mechanics

Leszek F. Demkowicz, Aerospace Engineering & Engineering Mechanics

Bjorn Engquist, Mathematics

Irene Gamba, Mathematics

Omar Ghattas, Mechanical Engineering

Patrick Heimbach, Earth and Planetary Sciences

Graeme Henkelman, Chemistry

Thomas J. R. Hughes, Aerospace Engineering & Engineering Mechanics

Per-Gunnar Martinsson, Mathematics

Robert D. Moser, Mechanical Engineering

Keshav K. Pingali, Computer Science

William H. Press, Computer Science & Integrative Biology

Michael Sacks, Biomedical Engineering

Maria Stanzione, Oden Institute

Rachel Ward, Mathematics

Mary F. Wheeler, Aerospace Engineering, Engineering Mechanics & Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering

Karen E. Willcox, Aerospace Engineering & Engineering Mechanics; Director, Oden Institute (Chair)

Thomas Yankeelov, Biomedical Engineering & Diagnostic Medicine, Dell Medical School

Policy Board

The primary function of the Policy Board is to provide strategic advice and help develop policies to ensure compliance with the terms and conditions of the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences charter and endowments. The Board is chaired by the Vice President for Research and includes the Oden Institute Director and Deputy Director, the Deans of the Cockrell School of Engineering, the College of Natural Sciences, the Jackson School of Geosciences, and the Dell Medical School, as well as two faculty members-at-large.

Dan Jaffe

Daniel T. Jaffe

Vice President for Research, Scholarship
and Creative Endeavors (Chair)

Karen E. Willcox

Karen E. Willcox

Oden Institute Director

David A. Vanden Bout

David A. Vanden Bout

Dean — College of Natural Sciences

Robert Moser

Robert Moser

Deputy Director

Claudia Lucchinetti

Claudia Lucchinetti

Dean — Dell Medical School

Omar Ghattas

Omar Ghattas

Member-at-Large

Roger Bonnecaze

Roger Bonnecaze

Dean — Cockrell School of Engineering

David Paydarfar

David Paydarfar

Member-at-Large

Claudia Mora

Claudia Mora

Dean — Jackson School of Geosciences

Board of Visitors

The Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences Board of Visitors consists of internationally recognized leaders from academia, industry and government laboratories. The charge of the Board of Visitors is to conduct external reviews of Oden Institute operations and provide advice on strategic plans and major policy issues. The current Board of Visitors members include the following:

Doug Kothe (Chair)

Associate Laboratories Director, Advanced Science & Technology

Douglas Kothe is Associate Laboratories Director (ALD) for Advanced Science and Technology and Chief Research Officer at Sandia National Laboratories. From 1988-2023, Dr. Kothe held program management positions at Los Alamos and Oak Ridge national laboratories. He served as director for the National Center for Computational Sciences, Department of Energy’s (DOE) Exascale Computing Project, DOE’s Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors, and was ALD for Computing and Computational Sciences. He drove creation, application, and deployment of Virtual Environment for Reactor Applications, a 2016 R&D 100 Award winner offering a technology step change for the U.S. nuclear energy industry.

Thomas Halsey

Thomas Halsey

ExxonMobil Chief Computational and Data Scientist (retired)

Thomas Halsey recently retired from the position of Chief Computational and Data Scientist at the ExxonMobil Upstream Research Company in Spring, Texas. In this role, he exercised technical leadership of modeling physics, applied mathematics, technical software engineering, and high performance computing for ExxonMobil's global hydrocarbon exploration and production research, development, and business activities.

Halsey joined ExxonMobil in 1994 at the Corporate Strategic Research Laboratories in Annandale, NJ. Since then, he served in a variety of research, staff, and management roles within the company, including Director of the Physical and Mathematical Sciences Laboratory in Annandale, Greenhouse Gas policy analyst in corporate headquarters in Irving, TX, and founding Manager of the Computational Sciences department at the Upstream Research Company, where he also managed a "breakthrough" innovation program for seven years. He has been a thought leader in ExxonMobil’s digital transformation initiatives for over five years. From 1984 until 1994, Halsey was a postdoctoral fellow and then a faculty member at the University of Chicago, in the Department of Physics and the James Franck Institute. He received a Ph.D. in physics from Harvard in 1984. At Chicago, he was awarded both a Presidential Young Investigator award and an A.P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship. His contributions as an investigator include his co-invention of “multi-fractal” analysis of complex and chaotic systems (> 4000 citations), his work on diffusion-limited aggregation and pattern formation, his establishment of the fundamental physics of electro-rheological and magneto-rheological fluids, and his work on the rheology of dense granular flows. He has received more than 12,000 citations to over one hundred papers, patents, and edited books. He has held visiting positions at CE-Saclay (France), New York University, and Boston University; he has also served on advisory boards at Harvard, Northwestern, Rice, and New York Universities. He has served in leadership roles in the Materials Research Society, the American Physical Society, and the Society for Petroleum Engineers. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Youssef Marzouk

Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Co-Director, Center for Computational Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Youssef Marzouk is a professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT and co-director of the MIT Center for Computational Science and Engineering. He is also a core member of MIT’s Statistics and Data Science Center and director of MIT’s Aerospace Computational Design Laboratory. His research interests lie at the intersection of computation and statistical inference with physical modeling. He develops new methodologies for uncertainty quantification, Bayesian modeling and computation, data assimilation, experimental design, and machine learning in complex physical systems. His methodological work is motivated by a wide variety of engineering and environmental applications.

Barbara Wohlmuth

Chair, Department of Numerical Analysis, Technical University of Munich (TUM)

Barbara Wohlmuth's research examines the numerical simulation of partial differential equations. Special areas of interest here are discretization techniques, adaptivity, multi-scale solvers and the mathematical modeling of coupled multi-field problems. Interdisciplinary cooperation with engineering experts is an important part of her work. Prof. Wohlmuth studied mathematics at TUM and the University of Grenoble. She completed her doctorate in 1995 at TUM and her lecturer qualification in 2000 at the University of Augsburg. After that, she did research at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University and the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris. She also worked as a visiting professor in France and Hong Kong. In 2010, Prof. Wohlmuth accepted her current position at TUM. She is a member of the Executive Board of the Association of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics (GAMM) and Chair of the Advisory Board of the Weierstrass Institute for Applied Analysis and Stochastics. She is also a member of the Editorial Board of Computational Mechanics, Zeitschrift für Angewandte Mathematik und Mechanik, SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing and Numerische Mathematik.