There are those who think of summer as a time for vacation and leisure activity, but the summer term is when many faculty pull out the stops for research, collaboration, programming, lectures and more. Here is a highlight of what some of the Scientific Computing faculty accomplished this summer.

Peter Beerli

+ Did programming to enhance the functionality of his software, Migrate, which estimates population sizes and past migration rates.

+ Delivered a workshop on molecular evolution at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

+ Authored and published an article entitled Evolution of serum albumin intron-1 is shaped by a 5' truncated non-long terminal repeat retrotransposon in western Palearctic water frogs (Neobatrachia), along with Jorg Plotner, Frank Kohler, Thomas Uzzell, Robert Schreiber, Gaston-Denis Guex, and Hansjurg Hotz in Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution.

+ Published a book chapter entitled, “How to use migrate or why are Markov chain Monte Carlo programs difficult to use?” in Population Genetics for Animal Conservation, volume 17 of Conservation Biology. The book is published by Cambridge University Press.

Anter El-Azab

+ Received a $1m grant from the Department of Energy to study nuclear fuels.

+ Mentored an undergraduate student from Illinois College as part of the REU program.

Gordon Erlebacher

+ Worked on a student prospectus.

+ Spent time doing research with some French collaborators.

+ Began preparation for a new course in Game Design for Spring term.

Alan Lemmon

+ Wrote a grant proposal to the National Science Foundation to study statistical methods for estimating the phylogeographic history of a genome.

+ Prepared for teaching Collection and Analysis this Fall term.

+ Planned projects and grants for 2010.

Anke Meyer-Baese

+ Traveled to Heidelberg, Germany as a European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) Research Fellow in systems biology. The goal of the research was to mathematically describe the morphology of cells and their aberrations.

+ Worked with the Max Planck Institute in Bonn, Germany in collaboration with the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. This research was to develop new algorithms for exploratory combinatorial optimization applied to structural biology and for graph clustering techniques applied to breast cancer stem cells.

Michael Navon

+ Gave a lecture at the Sibiu International Summer School in Sibiu, Romania on model reduction and numerical optimization.

+ Received NSF grants of over $300K for CMG Collaboration: Ensemble Data Assimilation for Nonlinear and Nondifferentiable Problems in Geosciences. He will work with collaborators at Colorado State University in Fort Collins.

Sachin Shanbhag

+ Mentored an undergraduate student from the University of Rhode Island in the Research in Undergraduate Education Program.

+ Published an article with Gopinath Subramanian in the International Journal for Multiscale Computational Engineering.

Tomek Plewa

+ Along with Jamie Guzman, studied the evolution of instabilities and mixing in Type II, or core-collapse supernovae. This work is the subject of papers submitted to Nonlinearity and Astronomy and Astrophysics, and provides a starting point for future investigations in the supernova explosion problem.

+ Hosted a guest, Adam Budde, from the University of Michigan. They worked on modeling fluid flow instabilities and material mixing in high-energy density laser-generated laboratory plasmas. The results of this study are being considered for publication in High Energy Density Physics.

Dennis Slice

+ Lectured at a symposium in Barcelona, Spain. His lecture was entitled "The Past, Present, and Future History of Geometric Morphometrics."

+ Gave many local and national radio, television and print media interviews on morphometrics and morphometric research.

Xiaoqiang Wang

+ Spent time doing research supported by NSF.

+ Performed research using modeling and simulations of biological microstructures. Two papers are in preparation featuring this research.

+ Studied image processing by using Centroidal Voronoi Tessellation techniques. One paper is in preparation from this research.

Ming Ye

+ Received an invitation to and gave a talk at the U.S. Geological Survey at Boulder.

+ Was awarded grants from the National Science Foundation ($105K) and the Department of Energy ($193K) to study groundwater and transport models. The grant from NSF is part of the federal stimulus dollars.

+ Published one article in the Journal of Contaminant Hydrology and one in the Vadose Zone Journal.