For the previous decade, MIT has provided doctoral-level examine in computational science and engineering (CSE) completely by means of an interdisciplinary program designed for college students making use of computation inside a selected science or engineering area.
As curiosity grew amongst college students centered totally on advancing CSE methodology itself, it turned clear {that a} devoted educational dwelling for this group — college students and college deeply invested within the foundations of computational science and engineering — was wanted.
Now, with a stand-alone CSE PhD program, they haven’t solely an area for fostering discovery within the cross-cutting methodological dimensions of computational science and engineering, but additionally a tight-knit community.
“This program recognizes the existence of computational science and engineering as a discipline in and of itself, so you don’t have to be doing this work through the lens of mechanical or chemical engineering, but instead in its own right,” says Nicolas Hadjiconstantinou, co-director of the Center for Computational Science and Engineering (CCSE).
Offered by CCSE and launched in 2023, the stand-alone program blends each coursework and a thesis, very like different MIT PhD packages, but its methodological focus units it other than different Institute choices.
“What’s unique about this program is that it’s not hosted by one specific department. The stand-alone program is, at its core, about computational science and cross-cutting methodology. We connect this research with people in a lot of different application areas. We have oceanographers, people doing materials science, students with a focus on aeronautics and astronautics, and more,” says outgoing co-director Youssef Marzouk, now the affiliate dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing.
Expanding horizons
Hadjiconstantinou, the Quentin Berg Professor of Mechanical Engineering, and Marzouk, the Breene M. Kerr Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, have led the middle’s efforts since 2018, and developed this system and curriculum collectively. The duo was intentional about crafting a program that fosters college students’ particular person analysis whereas additionally exposing them to all the sphere has to supply.
To develop college students’ horizons and proceed to construct a collaborative community, the PhD in CSE program options two standard seminar series: weekly community seminars that focus totally on inner audio system (present graduate college students, postdocs, analysis scientists, and college), and month-to-month distinguished seminars in CSE, that are Institute-wide and deliver exterior audio system from varied establishments and trade roles.
“Something surprising about the program has been the seminars. I thought it would be the same people I see in my classes and labs, but it’s much broader than that,” says Emily Williams, a fourth-year PhD scholar and a Department of Energy Computational Science graduate fellow. “One of the most interesting seminars was around simulating fluid flow for biomedical applications. My background is in fluids, so I understand that part, but seeing it applied in a totally different domain than what I work in was eye-opening,” says Williams.
That seminar, “Astrophysical Fluid Dynamics at Exascale,” introduced by James Stone, a professor within the School of Natural Sciences on the Institute for Advanced Study and at Princeton University, represented one in all many alternatives for CSE college students to interact with practitioners in small teams, gaining educational perception in addition to a wider perspective on future profession paths.
Designing for affect
The interdisciplinary PhD program served as a departure level from which Hadjiconstantinou and Marzouk created a new providing that was uniquely its personal.
For Marzouk, that meant specializing in increasing the stand-alone program to have the ability to continually develop and pivot to retain relevancy as know-how hurries up, too: “In my view, the vitality of this program is that science and engineering applications nowadays rest on computation in a really foundational way, whether it’s engineering design or scientific discovery. So it’s essential to perform research on the building blocks of this kind of computation. This research also has to be shaped by the way that we apply it so that scientists or engineers will actually use it,” Marzouk says.
The curriculum is structured round six core focus areas, or “ways of thinking,” which are elementary to CSE:
- Discretization and numerical strategies for partial differential equations;
- Optimization strategies;
- Inference, statistical computing, and data-driven modeling;
- High efficiency computing, software program engineering, and algorithms;
- Mathematical foundations (e.g., purposeful evaluation, chance); and
- Modeling (i.e., a topic that treats computational modeling in any science or engineering self-discipline).
Students choose and construct their very own thesis committee that consists of school from throughout MIT, not simply these related to CCSE. The mixture of a curriculum that’s “modern and applicable to what employers are looking for in industry and academics,” according to Williams, and the ability to build your own group of engaged advisors, allows for a level of specialization that’s hard to find elsewhere.
“Academically, I feel like this program is designed in such a flexible and interdisciplinary way. You have a lot of control in terms of which direction you want to go in,” says Rosen Yu, a PhD scholar. Yu’s analysis is concentrated on engineering design optimization, an curiosity she found throughout her first yr of analysis at MIT with Professor Faez Ahmed. The CSE PhD was about to launch, and it turned clear that her analysis pursuits skewed extra towards computation than the present mechanical engineering diploma; it was a pure match.
“At other schools, you often see just a pure computer science program or an engineering department with hardly any intersection. But this CSE program, I like to say it’s like a glue between these two communities,” says Yu.
That “glue” is strengthening, with extra college students matriculating every year, in addition to Institute college and workers changing into affiliated with CSE. While the thesis subjects of scholars vary from WIlliams’ stochastic strategies for mannequin discount of multiscale chaotic techniques to scalable and sturdy GPU-cased optimization for vitality techniques, the aim of this system stays the identical: develop college students and analysis that can make a distinction.
“That’s why MIT is an ‘Institute of Technology’ and not a ‘university.’ There’s always this question, no matter what you’re studying: what is it good for? Our students will go on to work in systems biology, simulators of climate models, electrification, hypersonic vehicles, and more, but the whole point is that their research is helping with something,” says Hadjiconstantinou.