Mathematician Malgorzata Peszynska was chosen as one of the plenary speakers at the 2017 SIAM (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics) Conference on Mathematical and Computational Issues in the Geosciences in Erlangen, Germany, September 11-14
An internationally recognized expert in multidisciplinary mathematical and computational modeling of flow and transport in porous media, Peszynska has conducted research across the fields of hydrology, oceanography, statistics, environmental, petroleum, civil and coastal engineering, physics and materials science.
Peszynska’s plenary talk was titled, “Methane hydrate modeling, analysis and simulation.” Methane hydrate is an ice-like substance abundantly present in deep ocean sediments and in the Arctic. Geoscientists recognize the tremendous importance of gas hydrate as a crucial element of the global carbon cycle, a contributor to climate change as well as a possible energy source. Hydrate evolution however is curiously not very well studied by computational mathematics community.
In her talk, Peszynska presented the challenges of hydrate modeling and a cascade of simple and complex models that address different scenarios involving multiple scales, and how coupled phenomena of flow, transport, phase transitions and geomechanics can be formulated.
She reported on most recent results obtained jointly with the geophysicists Marta Torres (Oregon State), Wei-Li Hong (Arctic University of Norway), mathematicians Ralph Showalter (Oregon State) and F. Patricia Medina (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), computational scientist Anna Trykozko (University of Warsaw), as well as many current and former students.
