CAIMS is pleased to announce that the 2012 Cecil Graham Doctoral Dissertation Award has been awarded to Dr. Vladislav Buksthynov, who completed his doctoral degree at McMaster University under the supervision of Professor Bartosz Protas. Dr. Buksthynov’s Ph.D. thesis was entitled “Computational Methods for the Optimal Reconstruction of Material Properties in Complex Multiphysics Systems”.

This dissertation addresses the problem of optimizing complex thermo-fluid phenomena in advanced welding processes. The major contribution is to develop a novel computational approach for reconstruction of constitutive relations based on incomplete and noisy measurement data. The solution is formulated as an inverse problem in terms of a variational optimization problem. Dr. Buksthynov has pioneered system reduction techniques for systems of partial differential equations using a 4D VAR method. His study opens many exciting new engineering applications.