Most graduate students working on multidisciplinary projects focus on a piece of the project of relevance to their major field of study, either applied math or geophysics. Rarely do students in multidisciplinary teams get the whole picture of the problem and hence a full understanding. The goal of this summer school is to attempt to overcome this dual-mode way of approaching science by providing an environment that encourages geoscientists to look seriously at the theory and encourages mathematicians to look more seriously at the physics while learning to communicate effectively with a multidisciplinary team.
The structure of this National Science Foundation sponsored workshop will have dedicate tutorial-style lectures and hands on demonstrations while the remainder of the day will be devoted to team projects. The conference will focus on introducing the students to a variety of topics including:
- Introduce the student to the anomalous character of fluids in nano-porous materials by exposing the student to statistical mechanical simulations of fluids in confined geometries, AFM and shear- apparatus.
- Introduce the student to upscaling tools: Volume averaging, homogenization, central limit theorems, method of moments, stochastic perturbation, percolation, networks, etc.
- Introduce the student to flow in porous media under uncertainty: Stochastic perturbation theory with stochastic Green's functions, multiscale perturbation methods, Monte Carlo methods with random space fields, etc.
- Introduce the student to continuum constitutive theories: Swelling media, magma flow, and nonlocal theories.
- Introduce the student to mantle convection and plate tectonic with magma migration and compacting porous flow
- Introduce the student to ecology of microbes in porous media
- Introduce the student to flow visualization: two and three dimensional particle tracking velocimetry and computer visualization
