Omar Ghattas

Cockrell Chair in Engineering
Professor, Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering
Director, Center for OPTimization, Inverse problems, Machine learning, & Uncertainty for complex Systems (OPTIMUS)
Principal Faculty, Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences
Professor, Computational Science, Engineering, & Mathematics (CSEM) graduate program
Professor (by courtesy) Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Jackson School of Geosciences
Professor (by courtesy) Department of Biomedical Engineering
Professor (by courtesy) Department of Computer Science
Director, Multifaceted Mathematics for Predictive Digital Twins (A DOE multi-institutional MMICCs Center)
Chief Scientist, TACC Frontera supercomputer
The University of Texas at Austin

Contact information:
email: omar@oden.utexas.edu
office: Peter O'Donnell Jr. Building (POB) 4.236
tel: +1 512.232.4304
mobile: +1 512.949.9818
fax: +1 512.471.8694
Assistant: Nasiha Muna, +1 512.232.2262, nmuna@oden.utexas.edu
Mailing address

Full Curriculum Vitae (81 pages)

Bio information:

Dr. Omar Ghattas is Professor of Mechanical Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin and holds the Cockrell Chair in Engineering. He is also Principal Faculty in the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering & Sciences and Director of the OPTIMUS (OPTimization, Inverse problems, Machine learning, and Uncertainty for complex Systems) Center. He is a member of the faculty in the Computational Science, Engineering, and Mathematics (CSEM) interdisciplinary PhD program in the Oden Institute, and holds courtesy appointments in Earth & Planetary Sciences, Computer Science, and Biomedical Engineering. Before moving to UT Austin in 2005, he spent 16 years on the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University. He holds BSE (civil and environmental engineering) and MS and PhD (computational mechanics) degrees from Duke University. With collaborators, he received the ACM Gordon Bell Prize in 2003 (for Special Achievement) and again in 2015 (for Scalability), and was a finalist for the 2008, 2010, and 2012 Bell Prizes. He received the 2019 SIAM Computational Science & Engineering Best Paper Prize, the 2019 SIAM Geosciences Career Prize, and the 2025 SIAM Ivo and Renata Babŭska Prize. He is a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and of the U.S. Association for Computational Mechanics (USACM). He serves on the National Academies Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics, is director of the M2dt Center (a DOE ASCR-funded multi-institutional collaboration developing the mathematical foundations for digital twins), and serves as Co-PI and Chief Scientist for TACC's Frontera HPC system.

Ghattas's research focuses on advanced mathematical, computational, and statistical theory and algorithms for large-scale inverse and optimal design/control problems governed by models of complex engineered and natural systems. He and his group are developing algorithms to overcome the challenges of Bayesian inverse problems and data assimilation, Bayesian optimal experimental design, and optimal control & design under uncertainty, for large-scale complex systems. These include structure-exploiting methods for dimension reduction, surrogates, and neural network approximation, along with high performance computing algorithms. These components are integrated and coupled together to form frameworks for digital twins. Driving applications include those in geophysics and earth systems (earthquakes, ice sheet dynamics, ice-ocean interaction, poroelasticity, seismology, subsurface flows, tsunamis), advanced materials and manufacturing processes (metamaterials, nanomaterials, additive manufacturing, nondestructive evaluation), and complex fluids.

Recent courses:
  • In Spring 2025, I am teaching CSE-393P/GEO-391/ME-397/ORI-391Q: Computational and Variational Methods for Inverse Problems. A flyer for this course can be found here.

Note: A new webpage is (and has perpetually been) under construction. If you're interested in any of my papers, my full CV contains hyperlinks to most of my published and submitted papers, including arXiv versions. Or just go to my Google Scholar page.

Ultrarunning/Mountain Running Mountaineering
When I have time I will scan my 1000s of slides... (right, sure).. for now just a few shots...