Jennifer Proft

Biography

Dr Proft is a Research Scientist at the Oden Institute at the University of Texas at Austin as well as an Adjunct Professor at Concordia University Texas. Prior to this she was a postdoc at UT Austin in the Mathematics department under the direction of Irene Gamba, and a postdoc in France at Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussees. She earned her doctorate in Computational and Applied Mathematics at UT Austin under the direction of Professor Clint Dawson.

Dr. Proft investigates the use of high-performance computing to significantly advance the state-of-the-art in environmental fluid mechanics. Her current research deals with numerical models to improve understanding of the mechanisms of flooding and hurricane storm surge involved in tightly coupled wind, waves, circulation, and rainfall. Using high resolution descriptions of the physical domain, she investigates accurate, robust and highly parallelizable numerical algorithms, including continuous and discontinuous Galerkin finite element methods applied to partial differential equations.