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Highlights

Dr. Milivoj Belic, the first recipient of the prestigious Al Sraiya Holding Group Professorship.

Texas A&M University at Qatar hosts experts to discuss computational science

Texas A&M University at Qatar hosted the first International Computational Science & Engineering Conference (ICSEC) 11-12 May at the Hilton Hotel Doha. The two-day event was co-organized by the Texas A&M at Qatar’s Advanced Scientific Computing (TASC) group in collaboration with the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) and the Qatar Environment and Energy Research Institute (QEERI). 

Texas A&M at Qatar Executive Associate Dean Eyad Masad said, “Texas A&M at Qatar is proud to partner with industry, government and academic collaborators such as QEERI and QCRI — and many others —to host the inaugural International Computational Science and Engineering Conference.”

The conference furthers realizing sustainable solutions to real-world issues and encourages the exchange of knowledge, ideas and expertise that is essential to fuel innovation and new thinking in research and computational science.
 
Masad continued, “This event illustrates the importance of industry, academic and government partnerships in developing scientific solutions that have direct impacts on the world around us.”
 
The ICSEC gathered researchers, experts and stakeholders locally and globally to discuss recent research topics in computational science and its role to tackle the most complex problems locally and globally.
 
Research Associate Professor Dr. Othmane Bouhali, conference chair and director of research computing at Texas A&M at Qatar, said, “This is the first computational science and engineering conference hosted in Qatar that brought computational material scientists, computational biologists and researchers in high-performance computing. We succeeded to collect more than eighty abstracts, including participation from Europe, U.S., Asia and the gulf region.”

All selected papers will be published in a special issue of the Journal of Computational Science.

 Distinguished Lecture Series by Dr. Cédric Villani

The third talk in Texas A&M University at Qatar
’s 2014-2015 Distinguished Lecture Series was given by Dr. Cédric Villani, professor of mathematics at the University of Lyon and director of the Institut Henri Poincaré.

Villani’s talk, “Long-time behavior of classical particle systems — from planets to galaxies to fluids,”
 was performed on 15 Jan. from noon to 1 p.m. in Lecture Hall 238. The long-time behavior of classical mechanical systems is a much studied and tricky topic since the time of Newton. In his talk, Villani presented several examples taken from old and new mathematical models, with connections to other mathematical and physical theories.

Villani studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure at Paris from 1992 to 1996. He obtained his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1998 under the direction of Pierre Louis Lions (Fields medalist 1994) at the University Paris Dauphine. His thesis was devoted to the mathematical theory of Boltzmann equation. From 2000 to 2010, he was professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Lyon, and since 2010, he is professor at the University of Lyon. He held several visiting positions at Atlanta, Princeton and Berkeley. Since 2009, he has also been director of the Mathematics Institute Henri Poincaré in Paris. He received many prizes, including the prize of the European mathematical society (2008), the Fermat prize (2009), the Henri Poincaré prize (2009) and the Fields Medal (2010). His main fields of research include the mathematical theory of kinetic equations (Boltzmann, Vlasov and their variations) as well as optimal transport and its applications in which he wrote two reference books.

Texas A&M at Qatar received $1.47 million in PDRA research awards

Texas A&M at Qatar received five Postdoctoral Research Awards (PDRA) awards totaling more than $1.47 million from the Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF). PDRA aims to attract and promote the direct involvement of recent Ph.D. holders to engage in further research work in Qatar and to promote human research capabilities inside Qatar. The program supports postdoctoral scholars to work in research groups in Qatar in areas that are of national priority to Qatar as outlined in the Qatar National Research Strategy. Areas of research include basic and applied research in all fields of natural sciences, engineering and technology, medical and health sciences, agricultural sciences, social sciences and humanities. PDRA awards are highly competitive, both financially and in the standards of excellence required.

One of the awards was given to Dr. Rajesh Kumar Raju, working under Associate Professor of Chemistry Dr. Edward N. Brothers. Dr. Raju's work is a study of computational design on an efficient cascade catalytic scheme for the conversion of CO2 to methanol.

Shedding light on photonics

Interview with Dr. Milivoj Belic, Professor of Physics, on this research team and goals after winning the 2014 Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF) Best Research Team Award.

Dr. Milivoj Belic - Schematic - Texas A&M University at Qatar