Seventh BGCE Student Paper Prize

Out of 12 high-quality con­tribu­tions from 12 uni­versi­ties and re­search insti­tu­tions of eight coun­tries, two Ph.D can­di­dates - Eliza­beth Qian from MIT and Zakia Zainib from SIS­SA were se­lected as the prize win­ners by an inter­na­tional jury at the SIAM CS&E Con­fer­ence 2019.

Eliza­beth is cur­rently a third year Ph.D. can­didate in the re­search group of Karen Will­cox at the Mas­sachu­setts Insti­tute of Tech­nolo­gy. She holds an M.S. in Aero­space, Aero­nauti­cal and As­tro­nauti­cal Engi­neer­ing from MIT. Her re­search inter­ests are in the areas of com­puta­tional meth­ods for opti­miza­tion, model reduc­tion, and uncer­tainty quan­tifica­tion. Zakia is in the last year of her Ph.D. at SIS­SA (In­terna­tional School for Ad­vanced Stud­ies Tri­este, Italy) and is super­vised by Prof. Dr. Gianluigi Roz­za. Zakia re­ceived her M.Phil. in Com­puta­tional Math­emat­ics from the Uni­versi­ty of the Pun­jab, La­hore. Her re­search inter­ests broad­ly fall in the field of nu­meri­cal analy­sis. Spe­cifi­cally, she is inter­ested in the im­provement and appli­cation of exist­ing nu­meri­cal tech­niques, as well as in the exten­sion and appli­cation of re­duced order meth­ods for para­metric space reduc­tion, opti­mal flow con­trol and uncer­tainty quan­tifica­tion.

FAU and TUM finally host­ed Eliza­beth and Zakia in Erlan­gen and Mu­nich from May 19 to May 26. The focus of this visit was two-fold: First, our guests got in close con­tact with the host­ing uni­versi­ties and in­volved per­sons. Sec­ond, they pre­sented their fasci­nating re­search both at FAU an TUM, what led to inter­esting and fruit­ful dis­cussions with the corre­sponding re­search groups. In par­ticular Eliza­beth gave a talk on ”Transform & Learn: A data-driven ap­proach to non­linear model reduc­tion”, while Zakia pre­sented her work on ”Re­duced order meth­ods for para­metric opti­mal flow con­trol in coro­nary by­pass grafts, to­wards pa­tient-specific data assim­ila­tion”. More­over, we man­aged to organ­ize one of BGCE’s tradi­tional Re­search Days (i.e. the meet­ing of all per­sons in­volved in BGCE once per se­mester at every of the three loca­tions) in Mu­nich, such that they both were able to pre­sent their work and have de­tailed dis­cussions with the students of the Elite Grad­uate Pro­gram "Bavarian Graduate School of Computational Engineering" afterwards. 

Final­ly, Elisa­beth and Zakia also had the oppor­tunity to take a glimpse into the cul­ture, histo­ry and land­scapes of the dif­ferent re­gions of Ba­varia, where FAU und TUM are locat­ed. This did not only in­clude guid­ed city tours through the histor­ic town cen­ters of Nu­rem­berg and Mu­nich, a visit to the beau­tiful lakes Starnberger See and Am­mersee, the fa­mous An­dechs mon­estary, but also a culi­nary part: Our guests had to take a tour through the Ba­varian cui­sine and try the fa­mous “Rostbrat­wurst” and red beer from Nu­rem­berg, as well as a tradi­tional Ba­varian dinner at the An­dechs mon­es­tary.

To sum­ma­rize, Eliza­beth’s and Za­kia’s visit led to fruit­ful dis­cussions and new in­sight and ideas at both insti­tutes. They both proved to be very bright and tal­ented re­searchers. We are very happy that we had a chance to spend time to­gether and to estab­lish con­nec­tions and are look­ing for­ward to future coop­era­tion with both of them. We hope that our guests en­joyed their time in Ba­varia and are look­ing for­ward to meet­ing them again soon!

Text:
Jonas Schmitt, Elite Graduate Program "Bavarian Graduate School of Computational Engineering"