Profiles

Athanasios Tzavaras is a professor in KAUST's Applied Mathematics and Computational Science (AMCS) program, and principal investigator of the Applied Partial Differential Equations (AppliedPDE) research group.

Professor Tzavaras obtained a Diploma in Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering in 1981 from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece. He continued his studies in the United States, earning an M.Sc. in 1983 and a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics in 1985 from Brown University.

He held academic positions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1987 to 2005, the University of Maryland from 2005 to 2009 and the University of Crete, Greece, from 2002 to 2004 and from 2010 to 2014. Additionally, he has held visiting positions at Purdue University, U.S., Stanford University, U.S., École Polytechnique, France and the Université Marie et Pierre Curie - Paris VI, France.

Tzavaras is a fellow of the European Academy of Sciences. He is a member of the American Mathematical Society (AMS), the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and the International Society for the Interaction of Mechanics and Mathematics. He is Associate Editor of various journals and Corresponding Editor of the SIAM Journal for Mathematical Analysis.

Link to personal website.

Professor Tzavaras' research interests include mathematical modelling, analysis and computation of fluids and materials. He investigates hyperbolic conservation laws and the structure of fluid mechanics and elasticity equations.

Among his other interests are singularity formation in solid mechanics (cavitation and shear bands), multi-scale analysis, hydrodynamic limits and practical properties of fluids, kinetic models of dilute polymeric systems and discrete lattice dynamics.

Georgios Grekas is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Applied PDE group of the Applied Mathematics and Computational Science program (AMCS) of CEMSE division at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia. He received his Ph.D degree from the department of Applied Mathematics from the University of Crete in 2019. He held a postdoctoral associate position at the department of Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics, in University of Minnesota (2019-2022). Then he moved as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Applied and Computational Mathematics in FORTH, Greece. He joined KAUST and the Applied PDE group in March 2024.

His research interests include solid mechanics, biomechanics, numerical analysis and scientific computing. 

Majed Sofiani is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Applied PDE group of the Applied Mathematics and Computational Science program (AMCS) of CEMSE division at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia. He received his Master's and PhD degrees from the department of mathematics at the University of Kansas in 2024. He joined KAUST at the AppliedPDE group in July 2024.

His research interests lie in the area of non-linear partial differential equations and dynamical systems. In particular his research focuses on the Eriksen-Leslie model for nematic liquid crystals.

Ms. Aseel AlNajjar is a Ph.D candidate in the AppliedPDE group of the Applied Mathematics and Computational Science program (AMCS) of CEMSE division at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia. She graduated from Taibah University in 2019 with a bachelor's degree in Mathematics and received a Master's degree in Applied Mathematics from KAUST in 2021. During 2018 Ms. AlNajjar was a summer research intern in the AppliedPDE group.