Prof. David Darmofal

David Darmofal is the Jerome C. Hunsaker Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT and a member of the MIT Aerospace Computational Design Laboratory (ACDL) and the MIT Center for Computational Science & Engineering (CCSE). His principal areas of interest are computational methods for partial differential equations, especially fluid dynamics; and engineering education innovation. He has written approximately 80 technical publications in peer-reviewed journals and conferences. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in fluid dynamics and computational methods. He also contributes to the MIT Common Ground effort.

In recognition of excellence in teaching and advising, he was honored with the MIT School of Engineering Bose Award for Junior Faculty in 2002

In recognition of excellence in teaching and advising, he was honored with the MIT School of Engineering Bose Award for Junior Faculty in 2002, appointed as an MIT MacVicar Faculty Fellow in 2004, and received the MIT Earll M. Murman Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Advising in 2011. In 2012, he received the MIT Bisplinghoff Fellow and the University of Michigan, Department of Aerospace Engineering, Alumni Merit Award in recognition for his contributions in research, teaching, and service. He has also been recognized by the MIT student chapter of the AIAA for excellence in undergraduate teaching (2005, 2013) and undergraduate advising (2017). He received a CAREER Award from the NSF in 1997. He is an Associate Fellow of the AIAA, and an ASME, ASEE, and SIAM member.

He received his BS in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Michigan (1989), and SM (1991) and PhD (1993) in Aeronautics and Astronautics from MIT. He was an NSF Post-doctoral Fellow in Computational Sciences and Engineering under Prof. Bram van Leer at the University of Michigan (1994-1995). From 1995-1998, he was an assistant professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University. In 1998, he joined the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT as an assistant professor, receiving tenure in 2005 and becoming a full professor in 2010. He has served as the department’s associate and interim department head from 2008-2011.

He enjoys: listening and performing (piano, guitar, voice) music of all kinds; sailing, fishing, birdwatching (they do fly after all), hiking, gardening, and cooking (and eating) food. He’s also a sports fan cheering on the New England Patriots, Boston Red Sox, and Detroit Red Wings.

Since July 2017, David and his wife Claudia have served as the Heads of House at the MIT graduate residence, The Warehouse.

Here’s what’s happening!

July 26, 2023

The first MOOC offering of our Common Ground Introduction to Computational Science and Engineering launched on July 26, 2023 on edX as MITx CSE.002x. For more information about the class, see the background here.
October 26, 2022

Cory Frontin successfully defended his doctoral thesis "Error behavior and optimal discretization of chaotic differential equations" back on October 26, 2022! Congratulations to Cory, and best of luck to my fellow music and baseball fanatic moving forward!
October 21, 2022

Cory Frontin published the first journal paper from his doctoral work in Physics of Fluids titled "Output error behavior for discretizations of ergodic, chaotic systems of ordinary differential equations". Cory shows how statistical error due to sampling of long-time averages significant decreases the impact of higher-order discretizations. Being proponents and developers of higher-order methods, this was not a result we were hoping to show. However, it is quite thought provoking. Above is one of my favorite (or least favorite depending on your perspective) results from the paper showing how this trade between statistical and discretization error as a function of the timestep (for fixed number of timesteps). Cory also includes a start-up error model as well as the impact of parallelization.
August 15, 2022

After ~2 years of COVID this, COVID that, and a year of being on sabbatical, I'm going to try to keep my web page more up to date! First, I want to thank the Ann and H.J. Smead Aerospace Engineering Sciences Department for hosting my sabbatical this past academic year (2021-2022) at the University of Colorado Boulder. I had the honor of being supported by the Byram Distinguised Visiting Professorship during that time, which is a part of The Smead Program. In particular, I want to thank the inspirational forces behind that program, Ann and Joe Smead, and Michael Bryam. Further, I would like to thank Professors John Evans and Kenneth Jansen for opening their research groups to me during this sabbatical. Claudia and I will miss the views of the Flat Irons, the hikes, the low humidity, … Go Buffs!
July 5, 2022

Shun Zhang successfully defended his doctoral thesis "Three-dimensional Integral Boundary Layer Method for Viscous Aerodynamic Analysis" back on July 5, 2022! In a triumph of virtual interactions, Shun and his committee were spread across the country for his defense, and you can see us all in the screenshot taken after the defense: Shun was in California, I was in Montana, Dr. Steve Allmaras was in Washington state, Prof. Qiqi Wang was in Chicago (at an airport between flights!), Prof. Chris Fidkowski was in Michigan, Dr. David Rodriguez was in California, and Prof. Mark Drela was the one person actually in Cambridge, MA. So we covered all the continental US time zones!
February 18, 2020

As part of an initiative led by the School of Engineering’s Graduate Student Advisory Group in Engineering (GradSAGE), which the Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics is participating in, faculty are developing graduate advising statements. You can find my statement here.
November 22, 2019

Congratulations to Arthur Huang for the successful defense of his PhD thesis "An Adaptive Variational Multiscale Method with Discontinuous Subscales for Aerodynamic Flows"!
October 17, 2019

Marshall Galbraith, Philip Caplan, and Hugh Carson were co-authors on the paper "Verification of Unstructured Grid Adaptation Components" (AIAA paper number 2019-1723) which was chosen as the 2019 AIAA Meshing, Visualization & Computational Environments Best Paper from the 2019 AIAA SciTech Forum and Exposition. Congratulations!
October 1, 2019

Congratulations to Hugh Carson for the successful defense of his PhD thesis "Provably Convergent Anisotropic Output-based Adaptation for Continuous Finite Element Discretizations"!
August 1, 2019

Hugh Carson received a Best Poster Award at the 2019 US National Congress on Computational Mechanics for "Output-based Anisotropic Mesh Adaptation for Continuous Finite Element Methods". Congratulations!