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My general research interests are scientific computing, computational (plasma) physics and more recently also machine learning.

I have developed both particle-in-cell and plasma fluid codes for the simulation of electric discharges (non-thermal plasmas). I'm also active in the development of MPI-AMRVAC, a framework for (magneto)hydrodynamics simulations. My work has focused on topics such as adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) and fast elliptic solvers (e.g., multigrid). I like to study systems that have some intrinsic complexity, not coming from boundary conditions or input data.

Since 2018, I have been working on machine learning methods applied to space weather applications, in collaboration with Enrico Camporeale, as I have taken over two EU projects in this direction from Enrico (AIDA and ESCAPE, see below). Current research focuses on forecasting time-series data, recognizing magnetic reconnection, and the use of unsupervised methods for e.g. dimensionality reduction and clustering.

• 2024-2026 AGILE: Astrophysics on GPUs for InterdiscipLinary Exascience challenges (project with Netherlands eScience Center)
• 2023-2029 REGENERATE: Reliable Next Generation Actuation Systems (NWO KIC project)
• 2024-2028 Green Sparks (TTW OTP project #20344)
• 2019-2024 Plasma for Plants (TTW OTP project #17183)
• 2018-2022 Plasma assisted combustion (TTW OTP project #16480)
• 2017-2022 Let CO2 spark! (TTW OTP project #15052) * 2018-2022 AIDA (EU H2020 project #776262) * 2019-2023 ESCAPE (EU H2020 project #824064) ==== Supervision ==== Past postdocs, PhD students etc. in italic === Postdocs === * Alejandro Malagón-Romero * Ajay Tiwari (In collaboration with Enrico Camporeale) * Andong Hu (In collaboration with Enrico Camporeale) === PhD students === I (co-)supervise(d) the following PhD students together with Ute Ebert: * Yuting Gao (daily supervisor) * Thom Smits * Hemaditya Malla (daily supervisor) * Dennis Bouwman * Baohong Guo (daily supervisor) * Xiaoran Li (daily supervisor) * Zhen Wang (daily supervisor) * Andy Martinez === PhD commitee member === * Yihao Guo (2025, TU Eindhoven) * Hemaditya Malla (2024, TU Eindhoven) * Baohong Guo (2023, TU Eindhoven) * Zhen Wang (2023, TU Eindhoven) * Dennis Bouwman (2023, TU Eindhoven) * Xiaoran Li (2023, TU Eindhoven) * Hani Francisco (2023, TU Eindhoven) * Brecht Laperre (2022, KU Leuven) * Andy Martinez (2022, TU Eindhoven) * Alejandro Malagon (2021, University of Granada) * Shahriar Mirpour (2021, TU Eindhoven, co-promotor) === MSc / BSc students === * Francesca Schiavello (2021, UvA MSc) * Chris van der Heijden (2021, TU/e BSc) * Stijn van Deutekom (2020, TU/e BSc) ==== Ideas for research projects ==== Examples of research/project ideas: * Simulating incompressible flow with the Afivo framework * Exploring hybrid OpenMP/MPI parallelization for AMR frameworks * Solving plasma fluid equations implicitly. In particular, what is a good preconditioner? * Improving the convergence rate of Monte Carlo particle swarm simulations in low electric fields. One idea is to limit the drift in electron momentum due to collisions. * Coupling explicit and implicit time integration for plasma fluid models * Performing large scale 3D simulations of sprite formation * Coupling particle and fluid models in energy space, for the study of runaway electron production in electric discharges. * Extending the discharge model comparison of this paper to other fluid models