Prof Omar Ghattas
John A. and Katherine G. Jackson Chair in Computational Geosciences
Professor of Geological Sciences and Mechanical Engineering
Director, Center for Computational Geosciences,
             Institute for Computational Engineering & Sciences
Professor Biomedical Engineering & Computer Sciences
The University of Texas at Austin
Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences
1 University Station, C0200
Austin, Texas 78712 USA
http://www.ices.utexas.edu/~omar

 

Omar Ghattas is the John A. and Katherine G. Jackson Chair in Computational Geosciences, Professor of Geological Sciences and Mechanical Engineering, and Director of the Center for Computational Geosciences in the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (ICES) at The University of Texas at Austin. He also is Director of the KAUST-UT Austin Academic Excellence Alliance and holds courtesy appointments in Computer Sciences, Biomedical Engineering, the Institute for Geophysics, and the Texas Advanced Computing Center.

He earned BS, MS, and PhD degrees from Duke University in 1984, 1986, and 1988.

He has general research interests in simulation and modeling of complex mechanical, geological, and biological systems on supercomputers, with specific interest in inverse problems and associated uncertainty quantification for large-scale systems. His center's current research is aimed at large-scale forward and inverse modeling of whole-earth, plate-boundary-resolving mantle convection; global seismic wave propagation; dynamics of polar ice sheets and their land, atmosphere, and ocean interactions; and subsurface flows, as well as the underlying computational, mathematical, and statistical techniques for making tractable the solution and uncertainty quantification of such complex forward and inverse problems on parallel supercomputers.

He received the 1998 Allen Newell Medal for Research Excellence, the 2004/2005 CMU College of Engineering Outstanding Research Prize, the SC2002 Best Technical Paper Award, the 2003 IEEE/ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Special Accomplishment in Supercomputing, the SC2006 HPC Analytics Challenge Award, and the 2008 TeraGrid Capability Computing Challenge award, and was a finalist for the 2008 and 2010 Bell Prizes. He serves on the editorial boards of 11 journals, has been organizer of 11 conferences and workshops, and has delivered plenary lectures at 17 international conferences.