CSEM Student Poulson wins UT Dissertation Award

[[CSEM alumnus Jack Poulson received the UT Graduate School Outstanding Dissertation Award based on the impact of his subject, the originality/creativity of his work, the quality of his scholarship and writing, and its potential for publishing.

Poulson’s dissertation, “Fast Parallel Solution Of Heterogeneous 3d Time-Harmonic Wave Equations,” addressed solving the high frequency Helmholtz equation, which describes the propagation of time harmonic acoustic, elastic, and electromagnetic waves. Read more.]]

To do so he developed a highly scalable, memory-thrifty, fast, public domain software package for high performance computing. Like several of his other software packages he developed along the way, it is being incorporated into PETSc, the world’s most popular open-source library for the numerical solution of partial differential equations (PDEs).

His work has application to a broad set of problems, including geophysical exploration to locate oil and gas resources, characterization of the subsurface for tracking environmental contaminants or sequestering carbon, determining the radar cross-section of aircraft, nondestructive evaluation of critical structures, and others.

Poulson is now a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University.