Dr. Jing Zhao obtained her PhD degree in the Numerical Analysis Group of the faculty of Applied Mathematics in the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in 2015. Her PhD research focused on developing fast numerical solvers for the wheel-rail contact problems, arising from the railway industry. (To see her PhD thesis please go to: https://repository.tudelft.nl/islandora/object/uuid%3Ac227a75a-20b7-4d88-a0b4-7175b7e956b8.) She has expertise in numerical iterative solvers and high-performance computing.

In the same year, after her PhD, she joined Deltares as a scientific software engineer. Since then, she has been working on the development and maintenance of the Delft3D Flexible Mesh suite, which is an open-source software for numerical modelling of the hydrodynamic, morphodynamics, etc. The users of this software include governmental organizations, consultant companies, universities and research institutes all around the world. Her work for this software is related to the parallel computing, post-processing, etc.

From the last year, she became a (part-time) guest researcher in TU Delft. Her research interests are about the artificial intelligence, and the applications of the graphics processing unit (GPU).

In this lunch lecture, she will give a general introduction of Deltares, and talk about what knowledge of Applied Mathematics has been used for the software, and how it contributes to the real-life problems.