Josin Tom

Josin Tom graduated from National Institute of Technology Calicut, India with a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering and then worked in the Advanced Engineering group at Ingersoll Rand Engineering Technology Center, Bangalore, India. He did two years of graduate level coursework in Mechanical Engineering at North Carolina State University before joining Dr. Andy Bragg in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Duke University. The Theoretical and Computational Fluid Dynamics Group (TCFDG) led by Dr. Bragg offers him the opportunity to work in three areas he is passionate about: physics, applied mathematics and computer science. 

Josin is in the Computational Mechanics and Scientific Computing (CMSC) track and his broad research area is advanced fluid mechanics, with an emphasis on particle-laden turbulent flows. He aims to understand the multiscale nature of turbulence and the effect of particle inertia on various environmental problems. Some physical phenomena of interest are droplet formation in cumulus clouds, collisional aggregation in turbulent protoplanetary nebula and enhanced particle settling speeds in the presence of turbulence and gravity. His research aims to understand the fundamental physics in these problems using a combination of theoretical and computational approaches. This is done by running Direct Numerical Simulations (DNS) of particle-laden flows and post-processing large DNS data sets to gain physical insights and validate theoretical models, with the aim of developing of Particle Sub-Grid Scale (SGS) models for Large Eddy Simulations (LES). The computational part of his work involves developing and running Message Passing Interface (MPI) based parallel scripts (FORTAN, C/C++, MATLAB) in High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters.

 

Apart from research, Josin enjoys hanging out with his wife, reading, listening to audio books, playing and watching cricket, badminton, swimming and catching up with friends and current affairs.

Education

  • Ph.D. (Civil and Environmental Engineering), Duke University, Durham (2016 - Present)
  • Graduate Level Coursework (Mechanical Engineering), North Carolina State University, Raleigh (2014 - 2016)
  • B. Tech (Mechanical Engineering), National Institute of Technology, Calicut (2007 – 2011)
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