Topic: Meshing for Meshless Methods

Panel Members:

• Ted Blacker (Sandia National Laboratories)
  Ted Blacker has been active in meshing and geometry research for most of his career. He graduated with a Masters from BYU in 1983, joined Sandia and there developed the paving algorithm, various meshing primitives, wrote the FASTQ code, worked on geometric decomposition, plaster and whisker weaving and various other technologies. He established and lead the CUBIT project, founded the Meshing Roundtable and served as the conference chair multiple times. He received a PhD. degree from Northwestern University in 1993 and spent over 8 years in private industry leading the development of Fluent's GAMBIT product, a commercial preprocessing package, where the COOPER tool, virtual geometry overlays and numerous associated technologies were developed. He recently returned to Sandia National Laboratories where he serves as Department Manager for the Simulation Sciences Department, overseeing meshing and geometry development of CUBIT and leading an effort to integrate various tools for impact on the entire design through analysis process.
  
• J. S. Chen (UCLA)
  J. S. Chen is the Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering Department at UCLA. His research interests are in the development of finite element and meshfree methods for nonlinear mechanics, materials modeling, and multi-scale problems. He is the At Large member of US Association for Computational Mechanics (USACM), the General Council member of International Association for Computational Mechanics (IACM), and the founding chair of USACM Committee on Meshfree Methods. He was the Guest Editor of Computational Mechanics and Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering on Special Issues of Meshfree Methods, on the advisory board of International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering, and on the editorial board of International Journal of Computational Methods, Structural Engineering & Mechanics. He has more than 150 publications in the subjects of computational mechanics.
  
• Tadeusz Liszka (Altair Engineering)
  Tadeusz J. Liszka works as a Senior Scientist at Altair Engineering, Inc, after nearly 20 years at faculty at Cracow University of Technology in Poland. His PhD thesis and several related papers dealt with novel numerical methods, which nearly 20 years later were appropriately misnamed as 'meshless methods' (more specifically: Finite Point Method, and Element Free Galerkin method may find their roots there). In 1991 he joined Computational Mechanics, Co. (recently part of Altair Eng.) where he worked on adaptive Finite Element methods, and is one of co-authors of several computer codes based on PHLEX hp-adaptive technology. Dr. Liszka managed several research projects funded by NSF, NASA and Navy, which focused on various applications of hp-adaptive Finite Elements and meshless techniques for solid mechanics, fracture mechanics and CFD applications. In one of these projects the hp-adaptive finite element technology was combined with another meshless technique (Partition of Unity) - resulting numerical method is similar to finite elements but has capability to produce correct results using meshes with serious defects (mismatched elements, elements severely distorted, or even locally with negative jacobians) and can be used to solve physical problems with discontinuities (e.g. cracks) located across elements.
  
• Mark Shephard (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)
  Professor Mark S. Shephard is the Samuel A. and Elisabeth C. Johnson, Jr. Professor of Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He holds joint appointments in the departments of Mechanical Engineering, Aeronautical and Nuclear Engineering; Computer Science; and Civil Engineering. He is the director of Rensselaer 's Scientific Computation Research Center. Dr. Shephard has published over 200 papers in the area of automated and adaptive finite element modeling. He is a fellow and past president of the US Association for Computational Mechanics, and was recipient of the 1997 USACM Computational and Applied Sciences Award; a fellow and member of the General Council of the International Association for Computational Mechanics; a fellow of ASME and an Associate Fellow of AIAA. He is editor of Engineering with Computers and on the editorial board of five computational mechanics journals.