Feature
Postdoc fellows map out rewarding careers
Published Dec. 3, 2013
[[Postdoctoral researchers are an essential part of the ICES research community. The research and relationships postdocs develop at ICES often influence their careers long after they have left the institute. Here's what past ICES postdocs had to say about how their work at the institute helped shape their careers.
ICES is now accepting postdoctoral fellowship applications for Fall 2014. Deadline to apply is Jan. 6, 2014.]]
Name: Yongie (Jessica) Zhang
Title: Associate Professor Department of Mechanical Engineering Courtesy Appointment in Biomedical Engineering Carnegie Mellon University
Postdoc start year: 2005
Advisor: Chandrajit Bajaj and Thomas Hughes
My experience at ICES really helped me a lot in my current position. I was very lucky to get an opportunity to work with so many wonderful people at ICES and work on several interesting collaborative research projects. These experiences gave me very good training in fundamental research, interacting with people from different areas and backgrounds, as well as time/task management. All are important for my current faculty position. I would suggest new post-docs entering ICES think about what you really want to do for your long-term career, and learn from these wonderful people surrounding you. My current research focuses on computational geometry, mesh generation, computer graphics, visualization, finite element methods, isogeometric analysis and their applications in computational medicine, biology and engineering.
Name: Yuri Bazilevs
Title: Associate Professor of Structural Engineering, University of California, San Diego
Postdoc start year: 2006
Advisor: Thomas Hughes
While at ICES, I was fortunate to be a part of the original development of isogeometric analysis (IGA), a new computational technology that integrates CAD and finite elements. Today IGA presents an important research direction in computational engineering and mathematics. Furthermore, ICES has the most rigorous program in computational engineering and sciences in the world, and I try to bring some of this rigor to my own research and teaching at the University of California, San Diego, my home institution. Besides IGA, I focus on the development of computational methods of high accuracy and robustness for a variety of important engineering applications. I'm especially interested in solving coupled fluid--structure interaction (FSI) problems. Wind energy, including offshore wind, is currently my most developed area. I'm also interested in cardiovascular biomechanics, a field that has many computational challenges requiring advanced FSI methods development and application.
Name: Alex Rand
Title: software developer at CD-adapco
Postdoc start year: 2009
Advisor: Chandrajit Bajaj
My ICES experience helped a lot. I am basically doing the same thing (geometry preparation and mesh generation for modeling systems in complex 3D domains) in my current position as my primary focus at ICES. While the end applications are different (CD-adapco's primary users have an engineering focus, while at UT I was working in a group focused on biological applications), my contributions in geometry processing are essentially the same. Today, I spend more time writing code and less time writing papers, but, generally, nearly everything I worked on at ICES closely related to my current work. Working in Dr. Bajaj's group at ICES, I was involved developing and maintaining software throughout the image-to-analysis workflow and while I don't actively develop code in all of these areas at CD-adapco, my software either receives input from, or passes output to each of these components. So by being directly involved in the full process, I have a very clear picture of where my current contributions fit in, and what kinds of results are needed in the downstream steps. There is such a breadth of research activity in ICES and the affiliated departments at UT, it is a great opportunity to get exposed to things slightly outside of your main research focus. It isn't possible to go to every seminar (there are just too many), but it is worth it to rotate through the different seminar series outside of your main interests for a few months apiece.
Name: Troy Butler
Job: Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences at the University of Colorado, Denver
Postdoc start year: 2009
Advisor: Clint Dawson
My experience as an ICES Postdoctoral Research Fellow continues to shape my professional research plan to this day. I continue to collaborate both with the research group I directly worked with as a postdoc, as well as other researchers throughout ICES. My postdoctoral supervisor, Dr. Clint Dawson, encouraged me to pursue a variety of research interests that led to a diverse set of publications and funding opportunities. In my first meeting with Dr. Dawson, we laid out a three-year plan that led to my promotion as a research associate and becoming a co-PI on a multi-institutional NSF grant to improve storm surge forecasting in the Gulf of Mexico using innovative uncertainty quantification methodologies. I also expressed my desire to teach, and Dr. Dawson gave me the opportunity to teach a course on engineering computation to aerospace engineering students that diversified my teaching portfolio. New postdocs should sit down with their supervisor and come up with a professional development plan for their time at ICES. My current research focuses primarily on uncertainty quantification (UQ). We are currently applying novel UQ methods to problems involving storm surge and subsurface contaminant transport.