PIMS - SFU Hugh Morris Lecture: Marsha Berger

Could an asteroid that explodes over the ocean generate a tsunami threatening coastal populations far away? We show simulations of tsunami propagation from asteroid-generated airbursts. We then present a 1D model with an explicit solution to better understand the unexpected results. The model is then extended to explore the effects of dispersion and compressibility. We end with a discussion of appropriate tools to study the more serious case of an asteroid that impacts the water.

Speaker Biography: Berger is a pioneer in the field of high-performance parallel computing and and numerical analysis with a particular focus on computational fluid dynamics and its applications in aerospace engineering and aeronautics. Her contributions in algebraic multigrid algorithms, flux limiters and cut-cell methods are deep in both a mathematical and computational sense.

She was a recipient of the NSF's Presidential Young Investigator Award, a NASA Software of the Year award. She has been elected to both the National Academy of Science and the National Academy of Engineering; is a SIAM Fellow, and was most recently a winner of the Norbert Weiner Prize in Applied Mathematics.