First group of funded participants announced

We are happy to announce the first group of participants selected to attend the PASI, with travel grants. They are an accomplished group of scholars, including staff researchers at national labs and doctoral students from across the United States.

This group of seven young scientists includes some with a background in physical oceanography, others with training in seismology and yet others with experience in applied mathematics and high-performance computing. It is a multi-disciplinary set of talented people with an interest in applying their talents to the science of modeling tsunamis and storm surges.

For those applicants still waiting to hear from us, please note that final decisions have not been made, and the second group of selected participants will be announced very soon.

Kemal Cambazoglu

Dr Cambazoglu is an early-career researcher working in the field of physical oceanography and coastal engineering. His main research interests are numerical modeling of coastal ocean and nearshore environments in order to understand physical processes and to improve the predictive capabilities of forecast models.

Min Ding

Min is a fourth-year PhD student of Geophysics at the MIT/WHOI Joint Program. She is interested in using numerical modeling methods to investigate lithosphere dynamics and earthquake mechanisms. She is also interested in investigating the long-term tectonics in Chile and its relationship with the short-term seismic and tsunami processes.

Brian McFall

PhD Student, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology

Brian is a second-year PhD student working on the physical modeling of subaerial landslide-generated tsunamis in various topographic scenarios based on real-world events. He uses physical models with a landslide tsunami generator using large amounts of natural river gravel accelerated with pneumatic pistons. Before starting the PhD, he worked for five years as a project manager and commercial diver for an engineering firm in Texas, helping design storm drainage systems and inspect waterfront structures.

David Medina

David is a first-year PhD student. He double-majored in mathematics and computer science at The University of Texas-Pan American. His research involves high-performance numerical simulations of fluid flow using high-order spectral element methods in scalable GPU frameworks. He is an experienced programmer, proficient in C/C++, Java, and Python and has experience in parallel computing using OpenMP and MPI for traditional CPU-based clusters and GPGPU programming languages (CUDA, OpenCL).

Diego Melgar

Diego obtained his BEng in Geophysics from Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico in 2009. He works  in real-time geodesy and seismology and is concerned with rapid modeling of large earthquakes and their associated phenomena.

Wei-Cheng Wu

Wei-Cheng has an MS degree from National Taiwan University and worked as a professional engineer in the Water Resources Agency of Taiwan helping build regulation for flood management in flood-prone areas. He is now a second-year PhD student doing research in wave attenuation caused by heterogeneous vegetation, using both laboratory observation and numerical simulations. He is familiar with many codes of the field, including ADCIRC, GeoClaw, FUNWAVE and others.

Yulong Xing

Yulong obtained his PhD in Mathematics from Brown University, working with high-order numerical methods for hyperbolic conservation laws. He then spent three years at Courant Institute, New York University, working in multiscale modeling and computation for complex geophysical flows. He is a staff scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and an assistant professor at the Department of Mathematics, University of Tennessee. His research interest is mainly in scientific computing and numerical analysis, specifically, efficient/accurate numerical methods for partial differential equations arising from geophysical flows and other applications.

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