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Omar Ghattas

Professor, Oden Institute, Department of Mechanical Engineering

Dr. Omar Ghattas is a Professor of Geological Sciences and Mechanical Engineering at UT Austin. He is also the Director of the Center for Computational Geosciences and Optimization in the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences and holds the John A. and Katherine G. Jackson Chair in Computational Geosciences. He is a member of the faculty in the Computational Science, Engineering, and Mathematics (CSEM) interdisciplinary PhD program in ICES, and holds courtesy appointments in Computer Science and Biomedical Engineering. He is a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM).

Research

Research Areas:
Research Interests:

Professor Ghattas has general research interests in forward and inverse modeling, optimization, and uncertainty quantification of large-scale complex mechanical, geological, and biological systems. With collaborators, he received the ACM Gordon Bell Prize in 2003 (for Special Achievement) and again in 2015 (for Scalability), and was a finalist for the 2008, 2010, and 2012 Bell Prizes.

Research Labs & Affiliations:

Center for Computational Geosciences, Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (ICES)

Select Publications

Peng Chen, Umberto Villa, Omar Ghattas. May 15, 2019. Taylor approximation and variance reduction for PDE-constrained optimal control under uncertainty. Academic Press.

Peng Chen, Omar Ghattas. March 13, 2019. Sparse polynomial approximation for optimal control problems constrained by elliptic PDEs with lognormal random coefficients.

Peng Chen, Keyi Wu, Joshua Chen, Thomas O'Leary-Roseberry, Omar Ghattas. January 24, 2019. Projected Stein Variational Newton: A Fast and Scalable Bayesian Inference Method in High Dimensions.

A Alghamdi, MA Hesse, J Chen, O Ghattas. December 2018. Bayesian inversion of heterogeneous aquifer properties from GPS andInSAR data using poroelastic subsurface models.

Peng Chen, Umberto Villa, Omar Ghattas. December 17, 2018. Taylor approximation for PDE‐constrained optimization under uncertainty: Application to turbulent jet flow.

Awards & Honors

  • 2015 - ACM Gordon Bell Prize
  • 2014 - Best Poster Award, IEEE/ACM
  • 2014 - SIAM Fellow
  • 2012 - Joseph C. Walter Excellence Award
  • 2012 - CM Gordon Bell Prize Finalist
  • 2012 - Best Visualization Award, XSEDE Conference
  • 2010 - ACM Gordon Bell Prize Finalist
  • 2009 - Best Poster Award, SC
  • 2008 - ACM Gordon Bell Prize Finalist
  • 2008 - TeraGrid Capability Computing Challenge Award

Contact Info

Omar Ghattas
John A. and Katherine G. Jackson Chair in Computational Geosciences Professor
Homepage
(512) 232-4304
omar@ices.utexas.edu
POB 4.236
CV