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Oden Institute Recognizes 2021-2022 Graduates

By Olivia Shaffer

Published June 16, 2022

The Oden Institute hosted a reception to recognize graduating CSEM students in May of this year. Following the university-wide commencement ceremonies, several PhD and Master’s graduates gathered in the Faculty Lounge on the 6th floor of the POB building with their families to celebrate completing their degrees and to wish each other well as they move on to the next chapter of their lives and careers. 

The event honored the 16 students that graduated in May 2022, The event honored the 16 students that graduated in May 2022, as well as the August 2021 and December 2021 graduates. Oden Institute Director, Karen Willcox, led the faculty in recognizing the graduated students.

"Congratulations to all our PhD and Master's graduate students," she said. "Collectively, you represent an incredible set of accomplishments spanning computing, applied mathematics, statistics, machine learning, engineering, science, geoscience, and medicine. You, the students, are the reason we are all here and you make the Oden Institute the very special place it is."

Professor Willcox was joined by several other faculty including Robert Moser, George Biros, Todd Arbogast, Michael Sacks, Peter Stone and Patrick Heimbach. Each enthusiastically praised the achievements of their students and gave them parting words of encouragement as they enter their careers in academia, industry or national research labs.

"The Institute is very proud of everything you have accomplished so far, and we can't wait to see the positive impact you will have on the world in the coming years," added Willcox. "So please do keep in touch."

Ufuk Topcu, Rachel Ward, Al Bovik and Omar Ghattas could not attend, but sent their remarks, which were conveyed by Professor Willcox.  

The Institute is very proud of everything you have accomplished so far, and we can't wait to see the positive impact you will have on the world in the coming years.

— Karen Willcox

A list of all students who graduated this past year along with their faculty advisors and thesis title can be found below:

 

Six CSEM students completed their PhDs in May 2022:

Dhwanit Agarwal

George Biros

Numerical Methods for Fast Simulation of a Red Blood Cell

Naveen Himthani

George Biros

High Performance Algorithms for Medical Image Registration with Applications in Neuroradiology

Gopal Yalla

Bob Moser/ Bjorn Engquist

Numerical Discretization Effects in Large Eddy Simulation of Turbulence

Wenbo Zhang

Michael Sacks

Cardiac Simulations Using a Neural Network Finite Element Method

James Levitt

George Biros / Per-Gunnar Martinsson

Randomized Algorithms for Revealing Hidden Structure in Data-Sparse Matrices

Xiao Xu

John Foster

Homogenization Techniques for Constitutive Modeling in Peridynamics: From Analytical Methods to Machine Learning

 

Two students finished their PhDs in December 2021:

Tim Smith

Patrick Heimbach

Uncertainty Quantification of Ocean Driven Melting Under the Pine Island Ice Shelf

Ian Henriksen

Keshav Pingali

Abstractions in Python for Utilizing Diverse Hardware for Applications in Computational Sciences

 

In August 2021, there were five CSEM PhD graduates:

Farzan Memarian

Ufuk Topcu

Side Information, Robustness and Self Supervision in Imitation Learning

Shashank Subramanian

George Biros

High-Performance Inversion Algorithms for Brain Tumor Growth Models in Personalized Medicine

Faraz Torabi

Peter Stone / Inderjit Dhillon

Imitation Learning from Observation

Amelia Henriksen

Rachel Ward

Components and Principles of Streaming Principal Components

Wei Li

Clint Dawson

Data-Driven Modeling for Compound Flooding Simulation

 

One student graduated from the 5-year Integrated BS CS/MS CSEM program in May 2022:

Rishabh Thakkar

Ufuk Topcu

Hierarchical Game-Theoretic Control for Multi-Agent Autonomous Racing

 

There were four terminal MS CSEM graduates in May 2022:

Kliment Minchev

Rachel Ward / Al Bovik

Vision Transformer-Assisted Analysis of Neural Image Compression and Generation

Chenkuan Liu

Rachel Ward

Deep Domain Adaptation for Label-Efficient and Generalizable Bearing Fault Diagnosis

Joel Walsh

Moriba Jah

Identifying Launch States of Anthropogenic Space Objects Using Natural Language Processing

Emily Nguyen

N/A

 

Five MS CSEM students will remain at the Oden Institute to continue into a PhD:

Mathew Hu

Omar Ghattas

Ali Ghafouri

George Biros

Meghana Palukuri

Edward Marotte

Victor Chen

Clint Dawson

Graham Pash

Karen Willcox

Casey Stowers

Tom Yankeelov