Members

Björn Windén is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Ocean Engineering at Texas A&M University. He specializes in marine CFD with focus on ship resistance and propulsion. Björn received his doctorate from the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom on the topic of numerical simulations of ship performance in waves.

Before joining Texas A&M, Björn worked for a number of years in the Japanese shipbuilding industry and at the National Maritime Research Institute in Tokyo. He has extensive experience with numerical simulations of ship performance as well as conducting both model- and full scale ship performance experiments. In 2020, he launched the consulting company SHORTCUt CFD; which distributes the free Open Source CFD framework for studying ship propulsion and propeller performance using OpenFOAM.

Björn is also the instigator of this CFD community and creator of the current website.

Mirjam Fürth, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Ocean Engineering at Texas A&M university, her research focuses on the resistance and seakeeping performance of High-Speed Craft, numerical modelling of WECs, the development of numerical models for ship performance, and experimental evaluation of seakeeping properties of floating structures.

Before joining Texas A&M, she worked at the Stevens Institute of Technology and the Davidson Laboratory as an Assistant Professor. She did her Post doc at Yokohama National University, Japan, her Ph.D. at the University of Southampton and her M.Sc./B.Sc. is from KTH, Sweden.

Paul Mario Koola, Ph.D., MBA, is the Asst. Director of Freshman Engineering at Galveston and a Professor of Practice at the Ocean Engineering Department, Texas A&M University. His passion is to educate the next generation of engineers. Dr. Koola has a BS in Mechanical Engineering. His Ph.D. is in Ocean Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, where he was a tenured faculty until 1998, when he came to Texas A&M to do an MBA with a full scholarship. Dr. Koola is a US Fulbright Scholar, German Alexander Von Humboldt Fellow, and a Danish DANIDA Scholar. He comes with a wealth of knowledge from the industry. His greatest strengths are his experience spanning a significant spectrum of interdisciplinary science and engineering and the management of these technology programs. He has worked on multimillion-dollar contracts with the Department of Defense, Missile Defense, Department of Energy, and NASA. His current work spans a broad range of problems in computational science and engineering, specifically in the use of AI and machine learning in Ocean Engineering. Some specific applications he works on include new ocean infrastructure, Smart Energy Absorbing Structures (SEAS), ocean renewable energy-powered autonomous exploration vehicles, and marine cybersecurity. He helped build a 150kW Wave Power Plant on the coast of India based on his Ph.D. work in the 1990s that pumped power to the national grid.

Ahmed A. Hamada is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Ocean Engineering at Texas A&M University, where his research focuses on numerical hydrodynamics, naval architecture, and wave energy. A. Hamada's M.Sc. is in Transonic flows over a transonic airfoil from Aerospace Engineering, Cairo University. Prior to joining Texas A&M University, he was a Research Assistant at Stevens Institute of Technology, NJ

Omar Sallam is a PhD student and research assistant in the Department of Ocean Engineering at Texas A&M University. His research is focused on the dynamics study of offshore structures experimentally and numerically with high fidelity CFD codes such as OpenFOAM and ANSYS FLUENT.

Omar also is interested in the Reduced Order Models (ROM) that can mimic the CFD solutions with less computational cost.

Omar achieved his Master’s degree in Mechanical and Mechatronics engineering at Nile University, Egypt and Achieved his Bachelor degree in Mechanical Engineering at Menoufia University, Egypt.

Haneesha Iphineni is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Ocean Engineering at Texas A&M University, where her research focuses on CFD-based Numerical Wave Tanks using OpenFOAM.

Haneesha conferred her Integrated Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Ocean Engineering and Naval Architecture from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur with her master’s thesis focusing on the effect of pressure gradient on the evolution of turbulence features along AUV hull using ANSYS FLUENT.

Javad was born in Iran in 1994. He have received a B.S. degree in Marine Engineering from Persian Gulf University and have finished an M.Sc. degree in Ship Architecture at the Sharif University of Technology in Iran. He is now a PhD student and Graduate teacher assistant at Texas A&M university, Galveston. His interests include Fluid Mechanics, Experimental and Computational Fluid Dynamics, Programming, and Fluid-Solid Interaction. He also have experiences in Start-ups and working as a Plan Approval Expert in Iranian Classification Society, familiar with technical standards for construction/ operation of ships/ offshore structures and simulation/ analysis of ship stability.

Lisa Bratton is a graduate student seeking a M.S degree in ocean engineering. Bratton’s area of research focuses on biomimetic design for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV). She is designing a new AUV hull form inspired from a penguin and testing the hull through CFD simulations via OpenFOAM.