NSF Grant Supports Applied Mathematics Research at Grinnell
Assistant Professor of Mathematics Debdeep Bhattacharya receives a three-year, $250,000 NSF grant supporting fracture modeling research and undergraduate opportunities.
Debdeep Bhattacharya, assistant professor of mathematics at Grinnell College, has been awarded a three-year, $250,000 research grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
The award is part of a $500,000 linked collaborative grant between Grinnell and Louisiana State University (LSU), where the project will be led by Robert Lipton. Grinnell’s portion was awarded through the NSF’s Facilitating Research at Predominantly Undergraduate Institutions program, which supports high-quality research at institutions that do not enroll significant numbers of doctoral students.
Bhattacharya shared, “It is fascinating that math can predict how things break in real life. You can come up with a set of rules or equations that govern how each point of an object moves in relation to others. The solution will tell you how and where the fracture will appear. But these are usually big equations, and they are hard to solve on paper. This is where computers come in. You can use clever strategies to solve the equations quickly on special computing hardware such as GPUs or CPU clusters.”
Modeling Damage and Fracture
Bhattacharya’s project, “Collaborative Research: Analysis and Computational Methods for Blended Modeling of Dynamic and Quasistatic Fracture” (DMS-2607264), will contribute to the development of theory and numerical methods for computing solutions to the fracture initial value problem, which describes how cracks start and grow in material over time.
The work will help researchers better understand and model the effects of damage and fracture on geological material, as well as transportation and energy infrastructure.
Supporting Students and Applied Mathematics
The grant will allow Bhattacharya to purchase a GPU-based workstation, support 12 undergraduate researchers, and travel to collaborate with Lipton at LSU. He will also develop an advanced course, “Nonlocal Theory and Applications,” through MAT-314: Topics in Applied Mathematics, covering topics related to the grant.
The project builds on the growing momentum of applied mathematics at Grinnell, which has expanded from one faculty member to three over the past several years. The grant will further support faculty-student research while creating additional opportunities for students to engage with applied mathematics.