Director, Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin | Associate Vice President for Research | Professor of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics | W. A. “Tex” Moncrief, Jr. Chair in Simulation-Based Engineering and Sciences | Peter O’Donnell, Jr. Centennial Chair in Computing Systems. US/New Zealand.

“Simulating Complex Physics at Lightning Speed”

Wednesday 18 February 2026

Abstract

In silico experimentation is the way of the future: Computing enables engineering designers to explore new ideas beyond what is possible in physical experiments. But simulating complex physics is computationally expensive — just a single simulation can take days on a supercomputer, making it practically impossible for a designer to fully explore the high-dimensional space of design options. That’s where reduced-order models comes in — surrogate models that are empirically learned but firmly grounded in the underlying physics. These reduced-order models give the designer the predictive power of a sophisticated physics simulation, but they do it at lightning speed, compressing days of computation into seconds. In this talk, I will show how these computational speedups are a game changer for the design of complex engineering systems, such as next-generation rocket engines. 

Bio

Karen E. Willcox is Director of the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, Associate Vice President for Research, and Professor of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin. She is also External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. At UT, she holds the W. A. “Tex” Moncrief, Jr. Chair in Simulation-Based Engineering and Sciences and the Peter O’Donnell, Jr. Centennial Chair in Computing Systems. Before joining the Oden Institute in 2018, she spent 17 years as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she served as the founding Co-Director of the MIT Center for Computational Engineering and the Associate Head of the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Prior to joining the MIT faculty, she worked at Boeing Phantom Works with the Blended-Wing-Body aircraft design group. She is a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), and in 2017 was appointed Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit (MNZM) for services to aerospace engineering and education. In 2022 she was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE).

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