About Me
I have graduated from the PhD program here at VT in March 2011.
My academic adviser was Prof. Adrian Sandu.
Just before joining the VT CS department (in the fall of 2006), I got my engineer diploma from the "Politehnica" University of Bucharest as a graduate of the Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers. My diploma thesis advisor was Prof. Boris Jora.
Research Interests
My research focuses on adjoint sensitivity analysis for time-dependent ODEs and PDEs. Sensitivity analysis allows us to obtain quantitative and qualitative informations about the changes that occur in a given model's output due to variations in the model input(s) or other parameters. The adjoint flavor of sensitivity analysis proves to be particularly effective when applied to a model that has a very large number of inputs or states and just a few outputs or quantities of interest. A well-known example is 4D-variational data assimilation for weather prediction models. First or second order adjoints of local/global climate models can give invaluable information about the changes in the forecast quality when initial model conditions are varied to best accommodate existing observations of the atmosphere's state. The adjoint models are vastly superior to crude sensitivity analysis techniques such as the brute-force approach. For a very good introduction to adjoint models and their use in meteorology, read this paper.I am also very interested in automatic differentiation and its applications.
I spent the summers of 2009 and 2010 as a Givens Associate with the MCS Division at Argonne National Laboratory. My mentors were Dr. Paul Hovland and Dr. Mihai Anitescu.
More details about the project I am currently working on can be found here.
Last updated on Jan 1, 2008