Karen Willcox

Karen E. Willcox is Director of the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, Associate Vice President for Research, and Professor of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at The University of Texas at Austin. She is also External Professor and Science Board member at the Santa Fe Institute. Before joining the Oden Institute in 2018, she spent 17 years as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she served as the founding Co-Director of the MIT Center for Computational Engineering and the Associate Head of the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Prior to joining the MIT faculty, she worked at Boeing Phantom Works with the Blended-Wing-Body aircraft design group. She is a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), a Fellow of the US Association for Computational Mechanics (USACM),  member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), and in 2017 was appointed Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit (MNZM) for services to aerospace engineering and education. She was the recipient of the 2023 J.T. Oden Medal and the 2024 Theodore von Karman Prize.

Statement of Research:  Willcox's research uses mathematics and physics to craft computational methods that enable engineers to be more effective. Her reduced-order modeling methods allow complex simulations to be run in minutes instead of days, allowing engineers to explore more design options in search of higher performing, more sustainable designs. Her uncertainty quantification methods help engineers understand technical risks, leading to safer designs and more efficient design processes. Her work in developing scalable mathematical foundations for digital twins is leading to the next generation of intelligent systems that learn from data and adapt. She has collaborated with domain experts to apply these computational methods in settings that range from aircraft and rocket engines to community college educational pathways and cancer tumor modeling.