NHR Graduate School Scholars: Kick-Off Meeting with NHR@FAU Liaison Scientists
On Apr 8, 2025, all NHR Graduate School scholars in Erlangen participated in an in-person joint seminar with the local liaison scientists team. The goal was to get to know each other and to foster interaction and collaboration. In his introductory note, Prof. Gerhard Wellein, head of NHR@FAU, emphasized the importance and the potential benefits for the NHR graduate school scholars and envisaged such a meeting on a quarterly basis.
Then the five local scholars introduced themselves and their PhD projects, illustrating the variety and fascinating facets of HPC applications. Raviraj Mandalia from the group of Prof. Görling (Theoretical Chemistry) aims at improving the efficiency and accuracy of advanced density-functional methods by implementing sigma functionals to enhance the accuracy of the correlation energy. Both NHR scholars from the group of Prof. Rüde (Chair of Computer Science 10, System Simulation), attended the meeting: Fabian Böhm tries to model earth mantle convection via novel multigrid approaches for efficient solutions of large-scale partial differential equations. Daniel Bauer addresses a general challenge in the parallelization of partial differential equations, namely that the storage costs of a single number increase with an increasing size of a discrete problem. Jorge Balderas works in the group of Prof. Petra Imhof (Professorship for Computational Chemistry) and studies the DNA recognition by DNA-processing proteins by means of atomistic molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. Finally, Eren Tunç from the group of Prof. Böckmann (Professorship for Computational Biology) works in the area of MD simulations; he develops tools for seamless resolution switching between atomistic and coarse-grain MD simulation approaches.
After a short coffee break, the liaison scientists took over: Marius Trollmann (Prof. Böckmann, Biology), Dr. Frank Beierlein (Prof. Imhof, Chemistry), Dr. Egor Trushin (Prof. Görling, Chemistry), and PD Dr. Anselm Horn (Prof. Sticht, Medicine) introduced themselves to the scholars and presented some of their recent activities and their main scientific interests. The presentations were followed by an informal mix-and-match discussion about various aspects of the individual projects, joined by some members of the NHR@FAU over strong coffee and tasty cake. The meeting was concluded by the NHR@FAU executive secretary, PD Dr. Harald Lanig.
written by Dr. Anselm Horn, NHR@FAU