Speaker: Joseph Teran, Associate Professor of Mathematics, UCLA Location: Maxwell-Dworkin G125, 33 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 Time: Informal lunch with speaker, 12:30pm. Talk, 1:00pm. Title: Scientific Computing for Movie Special Effects and Virtual Surgery Abstract: Dr. Joseph Teran will talk about some exciting new applications of scientific computing for solid and fluid mechanics problems including the simulation of virtual materials for movie special effects, video game effects and virtual surgery. These new applications all have an increasing demand for physically realistic dynamics of materials like water, smoke, fire, brittle objects, elastic objects, etc. The computational demands arising in these applications are somewhat different than those traditionally considered by scientific computing researchers and many new algorithms are needed to address them. Dr. Teran will discuss these new scientific computing challenges as well as some recent algorithms developed in his lab to address them. Virtual surgery is a particularly exciting application area. A virtual surgery simulator is like a flight simulator for training surgeons (and would-be surgeons) in modern procedures. Dr. Teran will also discuss procedures related to repair and manipulation of soft-tissues. Other topics discussed will include GPU and manycore algorithms for real-time solution of nonlinear elliptic equations arising in elasticity problems and in incompressible flow, cut-cell methods for higher-order accuracy on structured grids and contact algorithms for thin structures. Bio: Joseph Teran is an associate professor of applied mathematics at UCLA. His research focuses on numerical methods for partial differential equations arising in engineering. This includes computational solids, computational fluids, multi-material interactions, fracture dynamics and computational biomechanics. One very exciting example of this research is virtual surgery. These techniques allow a surgeon to practice a given procedure on the computer rather than on a cadaver or patient. Other exciting applications include computer graphics and movie special effects at Walt Disney Animation. Teran was a recipient of a 2011 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) and a 2010 Young Investigator award from the Office of Naval Research. In 2008, Discover Magazine named him one of the 50 “Best Brains in Science.” For information about the future events at IACS, see http://iacs.seas.harvard.edu/events. The page includes a Google calendar with detauls on all IACS Seminars. _______________________________________________ Iacs-events mailing list Iacs-events(a)seas.harvard.edu https://lists.seas.harvard.edu/mailman/listinfo/iacs-events