Joint Appointment with ErSE (Prof Hoteit) and EnSE (Prof McCabe)
Alumni
Biography
Dr. Altaf recently joined the ESOM group as Research Scientist. He has worked as Research Associate at Delft University of Technology (TUDelft) working in Prof. Arnold Heemink's research group on data assimilation. During 2010-2012, Dr. Altaf was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Earth Fluid Modeling and PredictionGroup directed by Dr. Ibrahim Hoteit within the Physical Sciences Division at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology.
Research Interests
In the last few years, Umer has extensively been involved in the field of inverse modelling with focus on large scale systems. Altaf's recent projects include developing common data assimilation tools for hydrological and related communities and involve several research partners within Europe. His work at KAUST as a Postdoctoral Fellow was mainly developing a real time forecasting system to monitor storm surges from hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, while collaborating with researchers at the Institute forComputational Engineering and Sciences (ICES) at the University of Texas atAustin. Another important aspect of Altaf’s research is the development and application of model order reduction methods within the optimization framework by avoiding complex adjoint model derivations.
Selected Publications
MU Altaf, T Butler, T Mayo, X Luo, C Dawson, AW Heemink and I Hoteit (2013) "A comparison of ensemble Kalman filters for storm surge assimilation", Monthly Weather Review.
Altaf M., El-Gharamth M., Heemink A. W., Hotiet I. (2013), A reduced adjoint approach to variational data assimilation, Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics, 254, 1-13.
Altaf M., Heemink A. W., Verlaan M. (2009). Inverse shallow water flow modelling using model reduction, International Journal of Multiscale Computational Engineering, 7(6), 577-594.
Education
2010. Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
1997. Masters in Applied Mathematics, Quaid e-Asam University, Pakistan
Professional Profile
2014-Present: Research Scientist, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia
2012-2014: Research Fellow/Project Lead, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
2010-2012: Post-Doctoral Fellow, KAUST/University of Texas at Austin, USA
Scientific and Professional Membership
European Geophysical Union
Dutch Institute of System and Control
Awards
Best Poster Award, SIAM Conference on Mathematical & Computational Issues in Earth Sciences, Long Beach, USA, 2011
Best Poster Award at the Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference, San Francisco, USA, 2011
Scholarship from the Ministry of Science and Technology, Pakistan during master studies
