Cian

WilsonHe/His

Cian supports computational research efforts at the Earth and Planets Laboratory, developing and maintaining numerical scientific software for simulations of the Earth's core, mantle, and lithosphere.  His own research currently focuses on coupling thermodynamic and geodynamic models, with the goal of accurately capturing melt and fluid transport in planetary bodies.

He is the principal developer of TerraFERMA, the Transparent Finite Element Rapid Model Assembler, a core developer of Fluidity, a computational fluid dynamics code with adaptive unstructured mesh capabilities, a developer of Rayleigh, a pseudo-spectral model for magneto-hydrodynamic convection in spherical shells, a developer of ThermoCodegen, a flexible thermodynamic model development environment, a developer of SPuD, an options parsing and management system, and a contributor to PETSc and FEniCS.

After receiving an MESc in Earth Sciences and an MSc in Mathematical Modeling and Scientific Computing from Oxford University, Cian's Ph.D. in computational physics from Imperial College London looked at “Modeling Multiple-Material Flows on Adaptive Unstructured Meshes.” As a Postdoctoral Research Scientist, then Associate Research Scientist, at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, he worked on fluid migration in deformable porous media. He joined Carnegie Science in 2016.