Dear prospective student:

I know that the decision to attend graduate school is a tough one and so is the decision in choosing a PhD topic- this will define the rest of your life! In the CRUNCH group we are combining applied mathematics and powerful supercomputers to tackle some of the difficult open problems in physical and life sciences that involve differential equations in time, space or random dimensions. We pay attention to both the algorithms as well as the applications, and we are not afraid of branching out to new unexplored areas of computational science and engineering. Our group is perhaps the most diverse scientific computing group in the world in that respect: we study blood flow in the arterial tree but also engineering turbulence; non-Newtonian flows but also plasmas; electric networks but also structural mechanics; microflows and nanoflows but also airplane flows; high-order discretizations but also atomistic methods; deterministic but also stochastic PDEs; mesh generation but also grid computing. I invite you to read more details about some of our current projects on the crunch website. You can also check the quality of our publications on three different projects: Biophysics, Turbulence, and Shock Dynamics. Click here to read a review article on Stochastic CFD.

We are a big group - more than 10 PhD students in steady state - but we always have openings for new (and good) PhD students. We do not admit Masters' students but we like to include undergradutes in some of our projects. We have formed a multidisciplinary group by working closely with other Brown faculty across different fields including the Medical School (Profs. M. Maxey, C.-H. Su, B. Caswell, P. Richardson, D. Laildlaw and M. Jayaraman). In fact, many of the PhD students usually have more than one advisor. Some of the students pursue dual degrees, e.g. PhD in Applied Mathematics with Masters in Computer Science. We also share postdocs with MIT and Harvard Medical School. There are many international visitors in the group who interact closely with the PhD students. In the CRUNCH group we make the PhD student the leader of a particular project so we rely on self-motivating and hard-working dedicated individuals. This is the most important criterion for joining the crunch group: self-motivation and love for computational mathematics!

If you believe that you are such an individual and you want to join CRUNCH please contact me directly (gk@dam.brown.edu) or contact Ms. Jean Radican (radican@dam.brown.edu) for more details regarding the application procedure in the Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown University.

Thanks for visiting and good luck!

George Karniadakis