Tobin Isaac

  • Academic Institution: University of Texas
  • Program Year: 4
  • Practicum(s):
    Los Alamos National Laboratory (2010)
  • Degree(s):
    B.A. Computational and Applied Mathematics, Rice University, 2007
  • Field of Study: Computational and Applied Mathematics
  • Academic Advisor: Omar Ghattas

Summary of Research:

I am working on a large-scale, full-physics model for glaciers and ice sheets. My intention is to use statistical inversion to get information for quantities which are difficult or impossible to measure (such as the velocity of the ice near the bedrock) from data that can be collected in the field (such as the surface velocities).

Publications:

Burstedde, C., Ghattas, O., Gurnis, M., Isaac, T., Stadler, G., Warburton, T., and Wilcox, L. C. Extreme-scale AMR. In SC '10: Proceedings of the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (2010), ACM/IEEE. Gordon Bell Prize finalist

Isaac, T., Burstedde, C., Ghattas, O. Low-Cost Parallel Algorithms for 2:1 Octree Balance. Proceedings of the International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium (2012), IEEE.

Keyes, David E., et al. Multiphysics simulations Challenges and opportunities. International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications 27.1 (2013): 4-83.

Isaac, T., Stadler, G., Ghattas, O. Advanced numerical methods for the solution of the nonlinear Stokes equations of ice sheet dynamics. In preparation.

Awards:

National Merit Scholar, 2003

President's Honor Roll, Rice University: Fall 2003-Spring 2007

Louis J. Walsh Engineering Scholarship, Rice University: Spring 2003-Spring 2007

Outstanding Winner (top 2%) and Mathematical Association of America (MAA) Award Recipient (one of two), for entry in 2006 Mathematical Contest in Modeling, run by the Consortium for Math and its Applications (COMAP) [As one member of a three student team] (see http://www.comap.com/undergraduate/contests/mcm/contests/2006/results/ )

Graduated summa cum laude, Rice University, May, 2007

Awarded CAM Fellowship upon enrollment at ICES, UT, August 2007

Bavarian Graduate School of Computational Engineering Student Paper Prize; SIAM CS&E Conference, February, 2013