University of Texas at Austin

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The O’Donnell Fellows

Published Aug. 17, 2020

The Peter O’Donnell, Jr. Postdoctoral Fellowship in Computational Engineering and Sciences is a crucial component to the Oden institute’s commitment to producing world-class research. The postdoctoral research fund helps attract outstanding computational scientists who have recently completed doctoral studies in areas relevant to the Institute’s research programs.

Fellows receive stipends of $65,000 per year as well as UT Austin employee benefits and relocation expenses up to $1,000. Once again, Oden Institute is fortunate to welcome four exceptionally talented researchers, all of whom are coming from diverse research backgrounds.

Georgia Stuart

Ms. Stuart will receive her Ph.D. in Mathematics from The University of Texas at Dallas in October 2020. Her research interests are in uncertainty quantification for inverse problems, mainly with geoscience applications, high performance computing, and computational science education. At the Oden Institute, she will work with Dr. Clint Dawson in the Computational Hydraulics Group on problems related to oil spill modeling. Dr. Stuart will also work with the Expanding Pathways in Computing group at the Texas Advanced Computing Center to prepare K-12 teachers to teach computer science and computational science.

Dr. Ahmed Abdelkader

Dr. Abdelkader received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland in August 2020. His research interests are in shape modeling and approximation algorithms. His doctoral research focused on adaptive sampling schemes for geometric approximation. While at the Oden Institute, he will be working with Dr. Chandrajit Bajaj on geometric deep learning and its applications to problems in natural sciences.

Dr. Joshua A. Leveillee

Dr. Leveillee received his Ph.D. in Computational Materials Science and Engineering in December 2019 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In his graduate research, he specialized in many-body perturbation theory to predict the electronic structure and optical properties of solar cell and light-emitting diode materials. He currently works at the Center for Quantum Materials Engineering in the Oden Institute under Dr. Feliciano Giustino. Dr. Leveilee’s research focuses on the prediction and understanding of the phonon-limited electronic transport properties of topological semimetals and novel energy materials using highly parallelized first-principles techniques.

Dr. Rudy Geelen

Dr. Geelen received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science from Duke University in March 2020. His research interests are in the broad area of computational mechanics, model order reduction, and scientific machine learning, with a strong focus on coupled multiscale problems. His work at the Oden Institute is conducted under the supervision of Dr. Karen Willcox in the DOE-funded AEOLUS center on parametric reduced order modeling for additive manufacturing and materials applications.

By: Johnny Holden jholden@oden.utexas.edu