Doctoral Student Earns Robert J. Melosh Medal For Computational Mechanics Research
The Robert J. Melosh Medal Competition, named in honor of a civil engineering professor who pioneered research in the areas of finite element methods and computational mechanics, provides an international forum for students to present their dissertations and showcase their research.
This year, the Robert J. Melosh Medal recipient was Maruti Kumar Mudunuru who earned his doctoral degree in civil and environmental engineering from the Cullen College in the fall of 2015. As a student, Mudunuru worked with his faculty advisor Kalyana Nakshatrala to develop various numerical methodologies to address common subsurface challenges, such as hydraulic fracturing, contaminant transport and bioremediation, a waste management technique that uses organisms to remove or neutralize pollutants. His dissertation, for which he received the 2015 best dissertation award from the Cullen College, was titled “On Enforcing Maximum Principles and Element-wise Species Balance for Advective-Diffusive-Reactive Systems.”
For the competition, Mudunuru elaborated on the finite element methods connected to this research in a talk titled “Structure-preserving Finite Element Formulations for Advective-Diffusive-Reactive Systems.”