Lorena Barba, PhD

LorenaB200200

About the speaker

Prof. Lorena Barba obtained her PhD in Aeronautics from California Institute of Technology in 2004.  Her first degrees (BSc, PEng) are in Mechanical Engineering from Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, in Valparaíso, Chile.

In August 2004, she joined the Department of Mathematics at the University of Bristol, UK as a Lecturer in Applied Mathematics.  There, she was the leader of an EC-funded international project titled “Scientific Computing Advanced Training” involving 10 institutions in Europe and Latin America.  The project allowed more than 30 young aspiring scientists to spend an extended period immersed in a research group in Europe.

In the Fall of 2008, Dr Barba started a new position as Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering in Boston University. Dr Barba is a computational scientist and a fluid dynamicist.  Her research is currently focused on:

  • particle methods used for fluid simulation
  • development of fast and efficient algorithms
  • use of novel computer architectures, e.g., GPUs
  • fundamental and applied aspects of fluid dynamics, especially flows dominated by vorticity dynamics

Prof. Barba is the lead organizer of this PASI, and the principal investigator of the NSF funding under award OISE-1036435.

Sample publications

  • “Treecode and fast multipole method for N-body simulation with CUDA”,  Rio Yokota, Lorena A Barba, chapter 9 in GPU Computing Gems Emerald Edition, Wen-mei Hwu, ed.; Morgan Kaufmann/Elsevier, Jan. 2011. preprint
  • PetRBF—A parallel O(N) algorithm for radial basis function interpolation”, Rio Yokota, L A Barba, Matthew G Knepley. Comput. Meth. Appl. Mech. Eng., Vol. 199(25–28): 1793–1804 (2010) [doi:10.1016/j.cma.2010.02.008]