Our research is broadly defined around multiphysics problems in fluids and transport engineering, commonly involving phenomena such as: interfaces, shocks, electrohydrodynamics, turbulence, and micro/nano-scale engineering. Our work contributes to the understanding of these problems primarily through theoretical tools such as large-scale computation and techniques of applied mathematics. Numerical simulations enable quantitative visualization of the detailed physical processes which can be difficult to detect experimentally. They also provide insight for the development of reduced-order models. The ultimate goal in each problem is to provide a simple representation of the essential physics (ideally ODE-level) which would naturally induce insight into design, optimization and control. While these efforts at core rely on mathematical techniques such as asymptotic methods or statistical analysis, close interaction with experiments is crucial in identification of practical bottlenecks and validation of the theoretical assumptions.
Ali Mani is an Assistant Professor at the Flow Physics and Computational Engineering and the Mechanics and Computation groups in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Stanford University. He received his Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering from Sharif University of Technology in 2002, and his Master of Science in mechanical engineering from Stanford University in 2004, followed by his Ph.D in 2009. He worked as an engineering research associate at Stanford and a senior postdoctoral associate at MIT's department of chemical engineering before joining Stanford as a faculty.
1 October 2011: Welcome incoming graduate students Milad Mortazavi, Clara Druzgalski, and Shima Alizadeh