Center for the Mechanics of Undersea Science and Engineering
Meet the Director
Meet the Director
Meet Yuri Bazilevs, Director of MUSE
Founder and Director for the Mechanics of Undersea Science and Engineering (MUSE) research center, Yuri Bazilevs is a pioneer of Isogeometric Analysis – a new computational methodology that aims to bridge the gap between Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and Finite Element Analysis (FEA).
As an undergraduate student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Mechanical Engineering, Yuri was always fascinated with the mechanics of solids, structures, and fluids. While he could clearly see the power of advanced modeling in these areas, he felt underwhelmed with how limited analytical methods were in their ability to generate closed-form solutions to these PDE-based models.
I took my first course in Finite Element Methods (FEM) toward the end of my undergraduate studies and was completely blown away by the elegance and sophistication of FEM in its ability to approximately (but accurately enough!) generate solutions to mechanics problems with arbitrary complexity of the kinematics, geometry, and constitutive material behavior. I fell in love with FEM at that time and the love affair continues to this day.
Yuri’s research continued to focus on advanced computational methods, algorithms, and software for computational solids, structures, fluids, and fluid-structure interaction (FSI). Prior to joining Brown, he was the Vice Chair in the Structural Engineering department at the University of California - San Diego (UCSD), and taught in both the Structural Engineering and the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering departments.
After joining Brown University in 2018, Yuri quickly realized that Brown’s School of Engineering is uniquely suited for a research center dedicated to the advancement of undersea mechanics. Many of the department’s faculty members work mainly in the mechanics of solids and fluids areas. In addition, the school also has a number of degree programs that are well suited to meet the education and training goals the Navy has for its workforce.
MUSE came out of a confluence of factors. There is a significant US Navy presence in the state of Rhode Island, including the Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC), Newport. With this presence comes the need to locally develop science and technology of the Navy enterprise and to train new generations of scientists and engineers to work on the Navy technical challenges.
For Yuri, MUSE was an effort to provide a natural match between the Navy’s needs and the capabilities offered by Brown SoE. He also described it as an effort to expand the research at Brown into other areas of undersea mechanics like bioinspiration and robotics, which reflect the areas of strength of the Brown SoE faculty.
Publications
Read more about Yuri’s dedication to the field of computational mechanics.