Leonidas K. Gkimisis

Biography

Leonidas K. Gkimisis is a postdoctoral researcher in the Willcox Research Group at the Oden Institute since September 2026. He obtained his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics with honors in June 2026, from the Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg, conducting research at the Max Planck Institute for the Dynamics of Complex Technical Systems under the supervision of Prof. P. Benner and Prof. T. Richter. His doctoral thesis developed physics-informed, data-driven modeling techniques for complex fluid dynamics and fluid-structure interactions. 

Prior to his Ph.D., Leonidas completed a Research Master’s degree at the Aeronautics & Aerospace Department of the von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics  (honours), focusing on data-driven modeling of hypersonic flows. He also holds a Mechanical Engineering Diploma from the National Technical University of Athens, graduating first of his class in 2019.

Leonidas’s research focuses on surrogate modeling of nonlinear dynamics, with applications spanning problems in fluid dynamics, solid mechanics and fluid-structure interactions. Focusing on these applicatoins, he develops methodologies in physics-informed non-intrusive modeling, model reduction and domain decomposition to accurately simulate complex, high-dimensional physical phenomena at only a fraction of the computational cost of traditional computational fluid dynamics and finite-element solvers. He is specifically interested in establishing connections between first-principles and scientific machine learning, by encoding physical properties such as stability and operator sparsity directly into data-driven algorithms. This enables the inference of reliable, robust data-driven models that can comprise building blocks for many-query applications in control, optimization, and digital twin design.