About Us

UT Austin’s student chapter of SIAM was founded in 2008 to foster interactions between members of the applied mathematics community at UT Austin, across departments, institutes, and professional marks. We aim to provide a forum for discussing applied and computational mathematics and to help members prepare for future STEM careers in academia and industry. We also promote publications, conferences, prizes, and other opportunities offered by SIAM.

Chapter Officers

Shreyas Gaikwad

PRESIDENT

Ph.D. Student at the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences.

I am interested in leveraging data assimilation to better calibrate large ice sheets and ocean models in particular using Automatic Differentiation derived adjoint-based gradients. I also dabble with physics-informed machine learning applications in these domains.

Evan Scope Crafts

PRESIDENT

PhD Student at Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a widely used imaging modality in modern clinical medicine due to its excellent soft-tissue contrast and lack of ionizing radiation but suffers from a tradeoff between signal-to-noise ratio, image resolution, and scan time that limits the technique's applications and poses a barrier to improved health equity. My research aims to address these limitations by improving the design of MRI scans using techniques from optimal control and generative modeling.

Venugopal Ranganathan

VICE PRESIDENT

Master's Student at the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences.

I am interested in scientific machine learning. Currently, I work on applying physics informed neural networks to model fluid flow.

Xin Tang

TREASURER

PhD Student at Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences

I use optimization and machine learning techniques for process control and energy system. The current focus of my research is production scheduling optimization for fluctuating electricity prices and energy supplies.

Sophia Epstein

INDUSTRY LIAISON

PhD Student at Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences.

I seek to understand computational mechanisms underlying disease states characterized by abnormal behavior in neural oscillators. The current focus of my research is on neuron classification via optimization mechanisms.

Shane Rybacki

UNDERGRADUATE COORDINATOR

BS in Mathematics, BBA Business Honors

I'm a Junior at UT interested in a career in data science or quantitative finance.

Mohammad Afzal Shadab

SENIOR ADVISOR

PhD Student at Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences

I use numerical simulations to study diverse fluid flow problems in planetary sciences such as impact crater lake dynamics on Mars, melting of ice on glaciers and formation of planetary cores.

Mike Truong

SOCIAL MEDIA COORDINATOR

Undergraduate Student in Astronomy and Physics.

I work as an undergraduate research assistant developer for Keitt Lab's Biosensing project for whom I have successfully established a Discord Situation-Report automated bot for our environmental sensors, and I am currently leading the Sensor Communication and Audio Source Triangulation Mesh team working to establish a network communication mesh between audio sensors to aid connectivity, file transmissibility, audio source triangulation and 3D-mapping among our future environmental sensor deployment sites. I also hope to utilize most of my applied mathematics knowledge to further my astrophysical studies and research in analyzing data from Caltech's LIGO cosmic gravitational-wave background data collected from the LIGO observatory and its partners' observation runs.

Graham Pash

EVENT COORDINATOR

PhD Student at Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences.

I work broadly on uncertainty quantification methods to enable scalable predictive digital twins as a framework for robust decision making with applications to various engineering and health systems.

Naila Hajiyeva

UNDERGRADUATE EVENT COORDINATOR

3rd-year Undergraduate Student in Mathematics.

As part of the Autonomous Systems Group at Oden Institute, I apply AGI Systems Tool Kit to model drone communications in simulations of real-life scenarios.

Faculty advisors

Prof. Todd Arbogast

FACULTY ADVISOR

I work on development of a Eulerian-Lagrangian and WENO schemes for advective flow; the study of mixed methods and cell-centered finite differences for nonlinear and geometrically irregular elliptic problems; the modeling and simulation of multi-phase flow through porous media, including fractured and vuggy media, with applications to petroleum production and groundwater resources; numerical homogenization, subgrid upscaling, and domain decomposition of heterogeneous media; and simulation of the dynamics of the Earth's mantle.

Prof. Clint Dawson

FACULTY ADVISOR

I use numerical methods for partial differential equations, specifically flow and transport problems in computational fluid dynamics; scientific computing and parallel computing; finite element analysis, discontinuous Galerkin methods; shallow water systems, hurricane storm surge modeling, rainfall-induced flooding; ground water systems, flow in porous media, geochemistry; data assimilation, parameter estimation, uncertainty and error estimation.

Alumni

Mohammad Afzal Shadab
(President, Senior Advisor)
Meghana Palukuri
(Senior Advisor, Vice President)
Tyler Masthay
(Industry Liaison)
Pablo Rocha Gomez
(Undergraduate Representative)
Gopal Yalla
(President, Senior Advisor, Vice President)
Brendan Keith
(President, Vice President)
Tom O'Leary-Roseberry
(Treasurer)
Timothy Smith
(Industry Liaison)
Siddhant Wahal
(Industry Liaison)
Maximilian Bremer
(Event Coordinator)
Andrew Ma
(Math Department Representative, Industry Liaison)
Teresa Portone
(President)
Aditya Jain
(Vice President)
Jacob Sansom
(Undergraduate Representative)
Pearl H. Flath
(Founding President)