Dr. George Em Karniadakis is a preeminent scholar and leading authority in computational mathematics with transformative contributions to scientific computing and engineering simulation. He currently holds the distinguished Charles Pitts Robinson and John Palmer Barstow Professorship at Brown University, serving as Professor of Applied Mathematics and Engineering with joint appointments in both the Division of Applied Mathematics and the School of Engineering. After earning his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1987, he established his academic career with appointments at Princeton University as Assistant Professor and at Caltech as a Visiting Professor before joining Brown University as Associate Professor in the Center for Fluid Mechanics in 1994. He rapidly advanced to full professorship by 1996 and has maintained a significant visiting professorship at MIT in Ocean/Mechanical Engineering since 2000, reflecting his enduring influence across premier academic institutions.
Dr. Karniadakis pioneered foundational methodologies including spectral/hp-element methods for fluid dynamics in complex geometries, general polynomial chaos for uncertainty quantification, and physics-informed neural networks that have fundamentally reshaped computational science. His groundbreaking research has achieved extraordinary scholarly impact with an h-index of 109 and over 55,500 citations, demonstrating the profound influence of his work across multiple scientific disciplines. As a visionary in high-dimensional stochastic modeling, he has successfully solved complex problems in up to 100 dimensions, pushing the boundaries of computational feasibility in scientific simulation. His contributions to fractional partial differential equations and multiscale modeling of physical and biological systems have established new paradigms for understanding complex phenomena from turbulent flows to brain dynamics, with applications spanning engineering, physics, and biomedicine.
Beyond his individual research achievements, Dr. Karniadakis has demonstrated exceptional leadership as Director of the Department of Energy's Physics-Informed Learning Machines and Sciences Center and previously led the DOE Center of Mathematics for Mesoscale Modeling of Materials. He currently serves as lead Principal Investigator for multiple major initiatives including an OSD/ARO/MURI on Fractional PDEs and an OSD/AFOSR MURI on Machine Learning for PDEs, directing substantial research efforts that bridge theoretical mathematics with practical applications. His mentorship has cultivated generations of computational scientists through advanced courses on numerical methods for partial differential equations that have trained numerous graduate students who have become leaders in academia and industry. Dr. Karniadakis continues to drive innovation at the intersection of mathematics, machine learning, and physics, with his current research focused on advancing causal reasoning operators and developing next-generation computational frameworks for earth systems and embedded applications.
