Meet our Current CDSE Students

What made you choose UB for your PhD?

I did my masters in mechanical engineering here at UB. I came across the new CDSE program and I always wanted to work with applied mathematics with trending areas like data science and HPC.

What do you like most about CDSE at UB?

I like the coursework and committee-forming requirements. Working with members from different departments gives me feedback from a different perspective and I get to learn a wide variety of tools.

What are you working on?

I am working on CFD modeling of the earth at the subduction zones. I run high-resolution models of the geodynamics processes on the cluster with parallelization. I also deal with numerical solver optimization of PDEs using the PETSc tool.

What made you choose UB for your PhD?

Having attended a different SUNY school for my Bachelor’s degree (SUNY Geneseo), I recognized the high standard that the SUNY system, and especially University at Buffalo, held itself to.  I chose UB for my Master’s in Aerospace Engineering, and now for my PhD, because of its high academic reputation and its numerous opportunities for research. Having also grown up visiting my extended family in Buffalo, I knew what the city had to offer and was excited at the prospect of getting to live here.

What do you like most about the CDSE program at UB?

Nearing the completion of my Master’s, I knew that I wanted to transition my research direction towards Computational Astrophysics.  CDSE allows me the opportunity to explore various topics of interest, such as Astrophysics, and work with professors from different departments while not being held to a strict curriculum. I can tailor my PhD experience to my specific needs as a student and a researcher.

What are you working on?

I am currently working on developing time-stepping numerical integrators for scalable linear and nonlinear problems. With these integrators I can build multiphysics models and investigate astrophysical topics such as Magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) or Cosmological Dark Matter. These integrators will also be made part of the PETSc suite allowing other researchers to implement them in their own work.

What made you choose UB for your PhD?
While pursuing a masters in Aerospace Engineering at UB, I was introduced to the emerging discipline of computational science and UB’s initiative in this area and became immediately hooked.  This area seemed a perfect match for the skills I obtained while working as a software engineer and my interests and background in mathematical modeling and statistics.  In pursuit of this interest, I subsequently completed the required course work and received a Certificate of Advanced Study in Computational Science, and from my experience, UB’s professors are leaders in this field as evidenced by their knowledge and research in this area. I am pursuing a PhD so that I can become a leader in this field and decided to choose UB to learn from the best.

What do you like most about the CDSE program?
The CDSE program at UB is a cross-disciplinary program and I enjoy the collaboration with the various departments.  I enjoy working with my advisor and other members of the collaborative teams for projects I have worked on. I enjoy obtaining hands on experience developing computational science applications while working on my PhD; as students we have access to the high-performance computing environment provided by Center for Computational Research (CCR).

What are you working on?
Researching optimal transportation theory and applications.  I am developing software interfaces for the Pegasus Workflow Management System for compute and data-intensive probabilistic hazard map analysis and probabilistic forecasts.

What made you choose UB for your PhD?
My Masters program in Biostatistics & Bioinformatics at UB gave me the opportunity to contribute towards an NIH Buffalo CTRC funded project for the detection of early stage ovarian cancer. It exposed me to the diverse set of research areas at UB. Doing a PhD here was a natural choice for me to continue my research with Dr. Rachael Hageman Blair. 

What do you like most about CDSE at UB?
This is a true interdisciplinary program that encourages students to develop their skills and solve their research problems with the help of data science, applied mathematics & parallel-data intensive computing in the most personalized manner. I work in the area of Systems Biology and therefore the integrative nature of this program was very appealing to me.

What are you working on?
Controlling biological networks with the help of perturbations. I currently work on optimization of networks to change them from a diseased to a healthy state. 

What made you choose UB for your PhD?
I chose UB because CDSE is a unique, interdisciplinary program that is not offered in most colleges in the U.S.

What do you like most about the CDSE program?
I have the opportunity to work with professors in different fields of sciences. i know that when I graduate I will have the necessary knowledge in all the fields I need/am interested in to pursue my career.

What are you working on?
Currently I am exploring research ideas in data science, statistics and finance. 

What made you choose UB for your PhD?

After completing my BS degree in Aerospace Engineering, UB was a natural choice for an MS. While pursuing my Masters in Aerospace Engineering under the supervision of Dr. Paul Bauman, I was introduced to computational mechanics and its application in the Aerospace field, as well as CDSE. Seeing that my skills and research interests aligned with UB's initiative of ICDS, I decided to pursue my PhD at UB.

What do you like most about the CDSE program at UB?

What I like the most about CDSE is its outstanding faculty and interdisciplinary approach. The core faculty of this program consists of the entire university's brilliant minds across all departments. My current supervisors, Dr. David Salac and Dr. Matthew Knepley are from different departments (MAE and CSE respectively), which rarely happens in other programs. In addition to enhancing my research skills, the CDSE program allows me to broaden my set by taking courses from various departments such as STA, MAE or CSE, interact with professionals from various fields and research areas, and learn data science-oriented tools and programming, which opens up endless possibilities after graduation.

What are you working on right now?

My work revolves aroud Finite Element (FE) or Finite Difference (FD)-based simulation of multiphysics problems with applications in Aerospace or Biomedical fields. I have worked on developing an FE based immersed boundary method (FE-IBM) for simulations of field-structure interaction (FSI) problems using multiphysics software infrastructure GRINS, which ties into both libMesh and PETSc libraries. Currently, I work with PETSc, along with p4est software library in order to develop adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) techniques for level set method, using adaptive tree-based grids, which can be applied to vesicle dynamics and multiphase flow problems.

What made you choose UB for your PhD?

I came to UB to pursue a Master's degree in Mechanical Engineering. I completed my thesis with Dr. Battaglia and earned M.S. in June 2019. During those years, I found that the course curriculum and the research in UB are really good. UB focuses on not only the industrial skills but also quality research. UB offers a variety of courses and during a course in HPC, I met Dr. Knepley and I found that his research is very much similar to what I am interested in for my Ph.D. Therefore, I decided to stay in UB for a Ph.D. and join Dr. Knepley's research group.

What do you like most about the CDSE program at UB?

From the perspective of a researcher, I think any real-life problem requires us to know multiple fields. The CDSE program combines multiple disciplines as a unified tool to use it to solve problems. I find it even more beneficial to be part of a multi-discipline program because I can meet students and faculty members from other departments, and discuss all the relevant topics about my research. 

What are you working on?

I am exploring the ideas to solve the Navier-Stokes equations, which is useful in large number of applications in fluid dynamics problems.