Prior to Cambridge Dr Cirak was a Senior/Associate Scientist at the Center for Advanced Computing Research (CACR) at the California Institute of Technology. He has a PhD in Computational Structural Mechanics from the University of Stuttgart and was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Aeronautics and Computer Science at the California Institute of Technology.
Research interests
Dr Cirak's research is focused on computational modelling and analysis of light-weight structures originating from a wide range of applications, including structural engineering, aerospace and marine engineering. Specific areas of research emphasis include:
advanced discretization methods for integrated design, optimisation and analysis of solids and structural components such as beams, membranes and shells,
computational fluid-structure interaction with application to micro-air-vehicle design and insect flight, and
mechanical modelling and computational analysis of large-scale structural membranes, such as parachutes and inflatable decelerators for outer-space applications.
In terms of computational methods development two overriding themes throughout his research are:
the integration of, traditionally disparate, computational analysis and geometry using immersed and b-spline based finite element discretization techniques,
the development of scalable computational methods for simulating challenging engineering problems on high-end parallel computers.