When
Dr. Dimitri B. Kececioglu Memorial Lecture
Thursday, October 23, 2025, at 4:00 p.m.
Karen E. Willcox
Director of the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences
Associate Vice President for Research
Professor of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics
University of Texas, Austin
“Computational Foundations for Predictive Digital Twins”
AME S202 | Zoom link
Abstract
Digital twins represent the next frontier in the impact of computational science on grand challenges across science, technology and society. A digital twin is a computational model or set of coupled models that evolves over time to persistently represent the structure, behavior, and context of a unique physical system. A dynamic bidirectional flow between the physical world and the virtual world is central to the digital twin concept. Mathematically, these bidirectional flows manifest as dynamic data assimilation, control, and optimization tasks. Reduced-order models are a key enabling technology for predictive digital twins, since they provide the computational speedups needed to solve these tasks in real-time (or near real-time) dynamic settings. In addition, uncertainty quantification must be embedded within these tasks in order to ensure that the digital twin provides effective and trustworthy decision-making support. This talk presents a view of key needs to realize predictive digital twins at scale and some of our recent work in scalable methods to address these needs, together with examples across different engineering and medical application areas.
Biosketch
Karen E. Willcox is director of the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, associate vice president for research, and professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin. She is also external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Before joining the Oden Institute in 2018, she spent 17 years as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she served as the founding co-director of the MIT Center for Computational Engineering and the associate head of the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Prior to joining the MIT faculty, she worked at Boeing Phantom Works with the Blended-Wing-Body aircraft design group. She is a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), Fellow of the US Association for Computational Mechanics (USACM), and member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). She was the recipient of the 2023 J.T. Oden Medal and the 2024 Theodore von Karman Prize.
For more information on the Dr. Dimitri B. Kececioglu Memorial Lecture Series, visit the webpage.