Research Interests

For the last nine years I have designed several major computer codes in the areas of physics, computer science, and numerical analysis. I have lead teams of researchers to develop state-of-the-art computer codes in the area of high performance scientific computing/physics. I have expertise on solving large scale Partial Differential Equations (PDE's), particularly for numerical relativity, using state-of-the-art techniques (Adaptive Mesh Refinement) as well as in designing collaborative visualization tools, to be used over the Internet. I have also designed Monte Carlo codes to price derivatives using a Path Integral Monte Carlo Approach.

                                                                Rome Lab Weather Project (http://kopernik.npac.syr.edu:8888/
                                                                weather/). Project leader of small team of graduate students to bring
                                                                visualizations of current U.S. weather, and supercomputing forecasts
                                                                using state-of-the-art web technologies. Developing a collaborative
                                                                visualization system for multi-dimensional codes that will run over the
                                                                Internet. Technologies involved in these codes include Java, VRML
                                                                2.0, collaboration tools (TANGO), weather  forecasting service codes
                                                                (Unidata's LDM), etc.

                                                                Scientific Data Visualization (http://kopernik.npac.syr.edu:8888/
                                                                scivis/). Project leader to develop a "state-of-the-art" visualization
                                                                toolkit for  computational researchers and students. This project has
                                                                gained vast interest due to its usability, scalability, etc. This code is
                                                                written in 100% Java and includes such features as collaborations,
                                                                user-definable-filters, displaying 1D, 2D, 3D plots in a  variety of
                                                                modes. In addition users can animate graphs of all rank. Additional
                                                                information can be found at the web site.

                                                                Financial modeling (http://terminator.npac.syr.edu:4761/Demo/
                                                                history2.html/). Involved with a collaboration of business people and
                                                                academic people to develop a Monte Carlo code to price stock options.
                                                                Several interesting features of this code include running on high
                                                                 performance computers (SP2) using MPI, Path Integral Monte Carlo
                                                                Approach.

                                                                Supervision of graduate/undergraduate students. Management and
                                                                Supervision  of graduate and undergraduate students: In the last 2
                                                                years at NPAC, I have supervised 3 undergraduates in the Research
                                                                Experiences for Undergraduates in High Performance Computing at
                                                                NPAC (http://www.npac.syr.edu/REU/). I have also supervised 1
                                                                Ph.D. student in physics, 1 Master's student in Computer Science,
                                                                and 1 Ph.D. student in Computer Science. In addition I have
                                                                supervised 4 other graduate student projects since I have been at
                                                                Syracuse.

           Post Doctorate Fellowship
            09/94 to 12/95              University of Texas, Austin
                                                              Designed several numerical tools for the solution of large-scale PDE's
                                                              including:
                                                              * A three-dimensional elliptic PDE solver for the initial value solution
                                                                  of the  coalescence of two black holes. This code  used
                                                                  state-of-the-art numerical  techniques including: Multi Level
                                                                 Adaptive Techniques, Adaptive Mesh  Refinement, Deferred
                                                                 Correction.

                                                             *  General multi-dimensional interpolation schemes. These were
                                                                  written to be used on  parallel and vector machines.

                                                              * Lead an effort to start the Texas black hole evolution group.

                                                              * Lead the design effort for multigrid support in the Distributed
                                                                 Adaptive Grid  Hierarchy effort. Developed several efficient, parallel
                                                                 codes for this effort.
 

                Research Associate
            06/94 to 9/94               Center for Relativity, University of Texas, Austin
                                                            Designed  a large scale PDE elliptic solver for the initial value problem 
                                                            for general  relativity.

                Research Associate
            09/89to 6/94               Center for High Performance Computing, University of Texas, Austin
                                                            Worked on visualizations for medical imaging including:
                                                            * Designed visualization techniques to show MRI's and CAT scans in
                                                               three dimensions.

                                                            * Implemented a visualization technique to map from an abstract
                                                                mathematical model, to the human body to display the spread of head
                                                                and neck cancer.

                Junior Physicist
            1987,1988                   Plasma Physics Laborator, Diagnostics Division, Princeton University
                                                          Designed a large scale computer system for the diagnostic spectroscopy
                                                          group working on plasma physics, which is still in use today. Large portion
                                                         of the coding went into the reliability and maintanceof this code.

                B.S..,Physics                   Drexel University
                        1989

                       Software                   Fortran 77, Fortran 90, HPF, MPI, C, C++, Java, Perl, Maple, GL, Dore,
                                                            SGI's explorer, AVS,HTML.

          Senior Honorable Mention   Drexel University, Philadelphia
                                                      1989

Member and President of Sigma   Drexel University, Philadelphia
Pi Sigma, Physics Honor Society

                                                                    Studies in Multi Level Adaptive Techniques for Numerical Relativity
                                                                    A funded proposal to the Cray/Texas Supercomputing Grants at the
                                                                    University of  Texas at Austin.

                                Co-Investigator    I have been a co-investigator on 6 grants which have been funded for
                                                                     time on NSF center supercomputing centers with (Matzner et. al.)
 

• "Schwarzschild-Perturbative gravitational wave extraction and outer boundary conditions (w./ Abrahams et. Al.), submitted to Phys. Rev. Letters 1997.
• "Moving a Black Hole" (w/ Huq et. Al.), to be submitted to Phys. Rev. Letters 1998.
• "The Binary Black Hole Grand Challenge ADM code", (w/ Huq et. Al.), to be submitted to Phys. Rev. D, 1998.
• "Collaborative Scientific Visualization" (w/ B. Ki), Concurrency: Practice and Experience, November 1997.
• "Multigrid- An Approach in HPF" (w/ U. Dittmer), NPAC technical report (SCCS-772), 1996.
• "Multigrid support with the DAGH package: Specifications and Applications" (w/ M. Choptuik et al.), Site report, 1995.
• "A Technique for Tracking Apparent Horizons," (w/ M. Huq et al.), site report 1996.
• "A Parallel Implementation of Multi-Grid in one dimension" (w/ R. Guenth er), (Site report, 1994).
• "Visualizing Complex Patterns in the Spread of Head and Neck Cancers," (w/ L. Gray et al.), The International Journal of Supercomputer Applications 7, 167 (1993).
• "Three-dimensional initial data for the collision of two black holes," (w/ G. Cook et al.), Physical Review D47, 1471 (1993).
• "Properties of gravitational "solitons" ", (w/ J. Centrella et al.), Physical Review D43, 379 (1991).

• "Evaluating Java for the use of scientific data visualization", ACM 1998 Workshop  on Java for high performance computing, 1998.
• "New Features and enhancements in Scivis", Los Alamos BBH Grand Challenge meeting, 1997
• "An overview of the Binary Black Hole Grand Challenge effort", Syracuse Astronomical Society, 1997.
• "NPAC's Scientific Visualization System (Scivis)", Supercomputing 1997.
• "NPAC's Scientific Visualization System (Scivis)", NAVO, 1997.
• "NPAC's Scientific Visualization System (Scivis)", University of Southern Mississippi, 1997.
• "An overview of Scivis", ACM 1997 Workshop on Java for Science and Engineering Computation June 21-97 PPoPP Las Vegas, 1997.
• "Current Status Report on the ADM code in the Binary Black Hole Grand
• Challenge Effort", Los Alamos Workshop, 1997.
• "Stability Problems in the ADM code", Penn State University, 1997.
• "An Overview of NPAC's Scivis System", Penn State University, 1997.
• "Status and Future of 3D codes", Syracuse University, 1996.
• "Computational resource requirements", Syracuse University, 1996.
• "Current Status Report of the ADM Code in the Binary Black Hole Grand
• Challenge Effort", Syracuse University, 1996.
• "Syracuse & Texas effort on the collaborative hyperbolic ADM code", University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1996.
• "TX's large scale black hole evolution code, imposing outer boundary conditions", University of Pittsburgh, 1996.
• "The Initial value problem of General Relativity, numerical solutions", Syracuse University, 1996.
• "Advanced Computational Techniques in numerical relativity", University of Texas @Austin, 1995.
• "High accuracy Interpolators", University of Texas @Austin, 1995.
• "DAGH toolkit wish-list", University of Texas @Austin, 1995.

• Richard A. Matzner, Director of Relativity, Center for Relativity (Department of  Physics), The University of Texas at Austin, Austin.
• Geoffrey Fox, Director of NPAC and professor of Physics and professor of Computer Science at Syracuse University.
• Joan Centrella, Professor of Physics at Drexel University.