Team

Postdoctoral Researchers 

Dr. Chethana Rao is an aerospace engineer who earned her bachelor's in aeronautical engineering from Vel-Tech, Anna University, Chennai, India, in 2011. She obtained her MS and PhD in aerospace engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, India, in 2022. Her post-graduate research was focused on developing and testing novel polymer composites for aerospace applications. She has also completed her post-graduation in artificial intelligence and machine learning, an online program jointly offered by University of Texas, Austin and Great Lakes, Chennai. She previously worked as a senior project engineer in the aerospace engineering department at IIT Madras. Her primary work was on material modelling and material failure prediction using diffused crack-based models. She is constantly looking to expand her knowledge on experimental characterization and modelling of materials that benefit society. Her present work in NUI involves developing deep learning models to predict brain tissue deformation under impact load. 

Dr. Pratyush Kumar was born and brought up in India. He received his B.Tech degree in Civil Engineering with a university medal from Cochin University of Science and Technology in 2016. Later, he moved to the IIT, Patna, to pursue M.tech in the Department of Civil Engineering. Soon after his graduation from the IIT, Patna, in 2018, he joined the IIT, Madras to undertake PhD in the Department of Civil Engineering.His PhD work focussed on the accurate measurement and quantification of the non-uniform displacement gradient. Besides publishing several articles in peer-reviewed journals, the novelty of the work led to the filing of a patent. Soon after submitting his PhD thesis in December 2022, he joined as a post-doctoral fellow at the IIT, Madras, in January 2023.His current research interests lie in computational methods, experimental mechanics, and the development of a physics-informed neural network-based model to predict brain deformation.‌

Dr. Shaima Magdaline Dsouza was awarded PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India, in 2021 for research in the field of Computational mechanics under the supervision of Prof. Sundararajan Natarajan and Prof. Stephane P.A. Bordas. She proposed a robust modelling framework for implicitly defined interfaces using the Scaled Boundary Finite Element Method. During her doctoral studies, she has also worked on Phase-field methods for fracture, higher-order boundary conditions for acoustic scattering in an unbounded domain and uncertainty quantification. Prior to this, she graduated with a Masters from the National Institute of Technology Surathkal, India, in Mechanical Engineering. Following her graduation, Dr. Shaima joined a postdoctoral researcher position at KTH, Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. Her primary focus as a postdoctoral researcher has been on advancing multi-fidelity methods utilizing Gaussian processes to address vascular problems. Driven by a profound fascination for the intersection between mathematics, physics, and engineering, Dr. Shaima has an unwavering passion for enhancing the understanding and practical application of computational methods within mechanics.

Postgraduate Researchers 

Vikrant Pratap is in the second year of his Structured PhD program in Applied Mathematics. In his PhD research, he seeks to develop physics informed neural networks to describe the propagation of shear shock waves in the brain. He earned his B.Tech (Hons.) in Electrical Engineering and M.Tech in Instrumentation & Signal Processing in 2018 from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. Before joining the University of Galway, he worked as a researcher in the Research & Development Division of Tata Steel India.‌

Sean Tobin graduated from the University of Galway with a first-class Honours B.Sc. in the Physics with Theoretical Physics programme, in 2022. Over the course of the degree, he obtained three scholar scrolls, for receiving results in the top 6% of the college of science. He further honed his interest in mathematical modelling at the University of Galway, through the Stokes Modelling Workshop and an internship in the School of Applied Mathematics, analysing chain dynamics and relating it to the phenomena of the Chain Fountain.

In the academic year of 2022/2023, he followed the Mathematical Sciences M.Sc. at Utrecht University, developing a passion for machine learning. He is in the first year of his structured PhD in Applied Mathematics, concerning the application of physics-informed neural networks to the field of cardiovascular haemodynamics. His primary research interests include continuum mechanics, in particular fluid mechanics, machine learning, partial differential equations, and quantum mechanics.

Undergraduate Researchers 

‌Oisín Morrison received a M.Sc. in Computational Science and Engineering from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in 2023, receiving an EPFL Master Fellowship of the School of Basic Sciences. He earned his B.Sc. (Hons) in Physics with Theoretical Physics from the University of Galway in 2021. During his studies, he was awarded the Hamilton Prize in Mathematics from the Royal Irish Academy, also winning the Sir Joseph Larmor Prize, STERIS Prize in Physics, Michael A. Hayes Prize in Continuum Mechanics and the Peel Prize in Geometry from the University of Galway. Oisín’s research interests lie in applying computational methods to solve complex physics problems. During his master’s studies, his research has focused on multifidelity reduced order modelling using graph neural networks.