Our Staff
Dr. Gregory C. Burton
Dr. Burton has over 20 years experience in the analysis and simulation of turbulent flows. He earned a Ph.D. in 2003 in Aerospace Sciences from the University of Michigan, where as FXB Fellow, he studied computational fluid dynamics under Professor Bram van Leer and turbulence modeling under Professor Werner Dahm. He was one of 8 of 650 doctoral candidates to receive the Rackham Distinguished Dissertation Award in 2004. He continued his research as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Turbulence Research between 2003-2005 and in AX Division at LLNL between 2005-2008. He returned to Stanford University to serve as the CTR’s Senior Fellow between 2009-2010. Since returning to LLNL in 2010, he has worked in the Computational Engineering Division where he continues to specialize in developing numerical methods for the simulation of turbulent mixing and reacting flows using large-eddy simulation and Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes techniques. He focuses particularly on problems involving hypersonic flows, small-scale mixing, vortex dynamics and buoyancy-driven instabilities using his Nonlinear LES method in massively parallel configurations. He also has a primary role in establishing and running LLNL’s new Turbulence Analysis and Simulation Center (TASC), which specializes in applying advanced turbulence-simulation tools to a wide variety of turbulence, mixing and combustion-related problems encountered at LLNL and in industry.
Dr. Alejandro Campos
Dr. Campos is a research staff member in the Computational Engineering Division. He specializes in multiphysics turbulence simulations, which focus on the complex interactions between turbulence and additional physical phenomena such as chemical reactions, multiple phases, deformable structures, and electromagnetic fields. Particular applications of current interest include turbulence and transition for the aerothermodynamics of hypersonic vehicles, turbulent combustion in jet and rocket engines, turbulence effects on aeroelastic deformations of wind-turbine blades, and microturbulence in magnetic-confinement-fusion reactors. He completed a postdoctoral appointment at LLNL in early 2019, where he focused on turbulence simulations with application to high-energy density physics. Prior to this, he received a PhD and MS in Aeronautics & Astronautics from Stanford University, where he worked on engineering models for turbulent structures.
Dr. Victor M. Castillo
Vic Castillo is an engineer in the Computational Engineering Division with experience in hypersonic flow, turbulent convection, massively-parallel fluid code development, and chaos theory. Vic has developed a dual-grid solver for the compressible Navier-Stokes equation using cubic splines and has led an effort to analyze the relation between the thermal entropy production and the rate of information loss as a convecting system approaches a fully-turbulent state. At LLNL, Vic also has co-developed an implicit solver for multi-species hypersonic flow. Additionally, Vic contributes substantially to the STEM outreach program, which seeks to expose teachers and students to the value of computer modeling and simulation. Read a news release about Vic's work with the STEM outreach program, and learn more about Vic's remarkable own background here.
Dr. Ryan Crocker
Dr. Crocker joined LLNL in late 2015 and he is currently an analyst in the defense technologies engineering division. He attended Clarkson University where he received both a B.S. in civil engineering and a B.S. in mechanical engineering, with honors. He stayed on at Clarkson to build a parallel, finite element, model to study the cycle fatigue of a GE turbine intercooler, and the effect the fatigue had on the overall reliability of the intercooling system. For this work he was awarded a M.S. in mechanical engineering. After changing schools to the University of Vermont he completed work in the massively parallel simulation of thermochemically ablative, sub-sonic, turbulent flows using non-grid conforming techniques to simulate complex and dynamic geometries. He graduated with a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of Vermont in the summer of 2015, and since joining LLNL he has been working on simulation of the ablative mechanisms acting upon hypersonic vehicles.
Dr. David M. Dawson
Dr. Dawson received a Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Stanford University in 2015 where his dissertation research under Professor Sanjiva Lele of the Center for Turbulence Research focused on Large Eddy Simulation (LES) of Compression Ramp Shock Turbulent Boundary Layer Interaction (STBLI) using both wall resolved and wall modeled techniques. He was awarded an M.S. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Stanford University in 2010 and graduated Summa Cum Laude with a B.S. in Applied Physics from UC Santa Cruz in 2007. David has worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory since 2011 where he is a member of the Turbulence Analysis and Simulation Center and the Thermal Fluids Group within the Computational Engineering Division. David’s research interests include turbulence, shockwaves, large-eddy simulation, direct numerical simulation, multi-phase flows, high performance computing, and numerical methods. His work at LLNL has included multi-phase modeling of liquid deuterium-tritium saturated nanofoams under extreme acceleration for the LIFE project, Argon release risk assesment for the NIF facility, and model development, implementation, and evaluation for Multi-phase Blast Explosives (MBX) using the ALE3D code.
Dr. Daniel Driver
Dr. Driver started as an engineer in LLNL's Defense Technologies Engineering Division in 2016 after receiving a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering with a Designated Emphasis in Computational and Data Science and Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. As an undergraduate, he also studied at the University of California, Berkeley and was awarded a B.A. in physics in 2011. For his dissertation under Prof. Tarek Zohdi, Daniel studied multi-physics discrete element methods for modeling additive manufacturing processes and developed a domain specific language for computational mechanics. His interests span a wide variety of engineering disciplines and during summers as a graduate student he worked at LBNL on simulations for the Next Generation Light Source, at Siemens Energy on electro/magneto-hydrodynamics for novel casting methods and at LLNL on powder scale simulations of selective laser melting.
Dr. Ik Jang
Dr. Ik Jang joined LLNL in late 2016 as a postdoctoral researcher. He specializes in numerical methods in fluid dynamics and large-scale parallel computing, with his PhD work focused on modeling fluid behavior in scramjet engines. He also has experience with supersonic combustion and high-fidelity simulation techniques. At LLNL, his research interests have included multi-phyiscs hypersonic flows in massively parallel configurations, and multi-phase flows in practical applications, such as jet engines an industrial dryers. Ik holds a MS/PhD in mechanical engineering from Stanford University and a BS in mechanical engineering from Seoul National University.
Dr. Katherine Lundquist
Katherine Lundquist is a mechanical engineer in the Computational Engineering Division. She has wide ranging interests in the fields of computational fluid dynamics and scientific computing, and is interested in novel applications of CFD to both engineering and environmental problems. She is primarily interested in multi-scale CFD modeling, the development of coupled models, turbulence closures and near-wall stress parameterizations for large-eddy simulation, and immersed boundary methods. She is experienced in atmospheric modeling over complex terrain, transport and dispersion processes, and aerodynamics. Katherine earned a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, where she focused on improved surface boundary conditions and numerical algorithm development for simulations of atmospheric flow over complex terrain. While at Berkeley, she developed an immersed boundary method for the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model, which is a non-conforming grid technique for explicitly resolving complex terrain.
Elizabeth Stein, MS
Elizabeth Stein is a mechanical engineer in the Computational Engineering Division. Since joining TASC in early 2015, Ms. Stein has focused on aerodynamic and aerothermal computational analyses of vehicles in high Mach-number flows in massively-parallel configurations. She hails from a small company R&D environment, with the bulk of her 9 years’ experience there in rocket propulsion and recently clean energy combustors. Prior to joining LLNL, Ms. Stein worked on technology development programs for the Air Force Research Lab, taking turbomachinery aerodynamic designs from concept (TRL1) through demonstration testing (TRL6). Along the way, she has authored numerous winning DoD proposals, had five patents issued, and has published over a dozen technical conference papers. Her educational background includes a Masters in Aerospace Engineering from Georgia Tech in 2009, and a Bachelors in AE with highest honors from the University of Florida in 2006. Ms. Stein’s area of interest involves utilizing today’s higest-fidelity engineering capabilities to create a better tomorrow.
Ryan Vignes, MS, PA
Ryan Vignes is a mechanical engineer in the Computational Engineering Division. Ryan has made significant contributions to recent TASC space technology projects, including helping set up and run the first-ever three-dimensional turbulent reactive flow simulation of a novel aerospike engine design. He was also instrumental in the first ever fully 3-D large-eddy simulation study of the dynamics of impinging jets, commonly used in liquid rocket-engine injector desigins. Ryan has contributed a wide variety of other skills to TASC projects, including meshing complex industrial geometries for multiscale, multiphyiscs turbulence simulations.
