Fire and Ice, Earth and Oceans: Tools and Techniques for Researching Our Changing Climate with MATLAB

Zhaodan Kong, University of California Davis

Dr. Zhaodan Kong is an Associate Professor in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at University of California, Davis. He is also affiliated with the Center for Spaceflight Research and the Center for Neuroengineering and Medicine at UC Davis. He received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Astronautics and Mechanics from Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China, in 2004 and 2006, respectively, and his Ph.D. degree in Aerospace Engineering with a minor in Cognitive Science from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA, in 2011. Before joining UC Davis in 2015, he was a Postdoctoral researcher at Boston University. His research focuses on aerial robotics, human-autonomy teaming, machine learning, and their applications in agriculture, healthcare, environmental monitoring, and defense.

Shadi Mohagheghi, MathWorks

Dr. Shadi Mohagheghi is a Senior Application Engineer at MathWorks focusing on supporting Aerospace and Wireless Communications applications, and based in the Southern California. Prior to joining MathWorks, Shadi worked on positioning, navigation, and timing of GPS satellites at The Aerospace Corporation. She completed her PhD at UC Santa Barbara in Electrical and Computer Engineering and her BS at UC Los Angeles, all with a focus on wireless communications and signal processing. Her graduate research was focused on algorithm design for multi-agent systems.

Ajinkya Desai, University of California Irvine

Ajinkya Desai is a Ph.D. candidate in the Boundary Layers and Turbulence Laboratory at UCI. His career arc has been quite interdisciplinary. After graduating with his Bachelor's in Aerospace Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur, where he worked in the field of computational fluid dynamics, he moved to the USA for his Master’s at UC San Diego. His research there involved analyzing oceanographic field data for coastal flow mechanisms. He then studied flow-induced vibrations that pose damage risks to heat-exchanger tubes of nuclear reactors as a research fellow at IIT, Hyderabad. His current research interests involve applying the science of fluid mechanics and turbulence toward understanding wildland fire-spread mechanisms in forested and grassland environments. Ajinkya's post-doctoral ambitions include working toward the development of improved predictive models for fire-spread behavior and smoke dispersion, which would assist fire managers in designing more efficient fire-management strategies. Ajinkya also has an MFA in Dramatic Arts from the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego and has a keen interest in Acting and the role of theatre in social reformation.

Esperanza Linares Guerrero, MathWorks

Dr. Esperanza Linares is a Customer Success Engineer at MathWorks. She collaborates with faculty, researchers, and students in the United States and Latin America to ensure their success through MathWorks products. Before joining MathWorks, she did her postdoctoral work in the pharmaceutical industry, where she developed a discrete element method model to simulate the compaction of granular materials. Esperanza has used MATLAB for image processing, data visualization, acquisition, and analysis throughout her career. She holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering from UNAM (Mexico) and a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Caltech.

Josh Jones, University of California San Diego

Josh Jones is an oceanographer with expertise in the use of passive acoustic monitoring for the study of marine mammals and ocean environments, with a research focus in the Arctic. His research has involved a combination of underwater passive acoustic recordings and satellite remote sensing data, as well as collaboration with Indigenous communities, non-governmental organizations, and other stakeholders. He is a member of the Scripps Whale Acoustics Lab at University of California San Diego.

Kostas Leptokaropoulos, MathWorks

Kostas Leptokaropoulos is Academic Manager for Geoscience and Climate Science at MathWorks, located in Cambridge, UK. In his role, he supports academics and scientists with their teaching and research activities, by taking full advantage of the tools and capabilities that MATLAB offers. Kostas is an environmental engineer holding a Ph.D. in geophysics and seismology. As an assistant professor at the Institute of Geophysics of the Polish Academy of Sciences, he worked on several European-scale scientific and research infrastructure projects. Before joining MathWorks Kostas worked at the University of Southampton where he holds a visiting research fellow position.

Matthias Morzfeld, University of California San Diego

Matthias Morzfeld has a German undergraduate degree (Diplom) from Technical University Darmstadt and a Ph.D. degree from the University of California at Berkeley. Both degrees are in mechanical engineering. After graduating Berkeley in 2011, he spent four years at Berkeley's Department of Mathematics as a postdoc, where he also collaborated daily with scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. In 2015, Matthias moved to the Department of Mathematics at the University of Arizona as an Assistant Professor, where he taught courses on calculus, linear algebra, computation and simulation. In 2019, he moved to the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO), UC San Diego. At SIO, he still teaches courses on computation and simulation, but the target audience are now Earth scientists (not mathematicians). Matthias' research has focused on the analysis and design of computational methods for problems in Earth science and he was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in 2016.

Kevin Holly, MathWorks

Kevin Holly is an Application Engineer with a strong background in signal processing and image analysis, primarily within the neuroscience field. He earned his PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Louisiana Tech University. Kevin's expertise lies in utilizing MATLAB for a wide range of applications within neuroscience, including developing rodent tracking software, conducting image analysis with MRI datasets, and applying signal processing techniques to EEG and MEG recordings.