Visiting Student @ MIT | JGU Mainz
Hi, my name is Collin. In my research, I use clever mathematics and clever coding to make PDE simulations go brrrr.
More practically, I work across the computational pipeline for solving partial differential equations. This means for example deriving structure-preserving numerical methods, implementing them and making sure everything runs fast on both CPUs and GPUs.
Right now I'm a visiting student @ MIT (Fall 2025–Spring 2026) working with Robert Metcalfe and Alan Edelman on GPU-accelerated simulations of geothermal well arrays. Back home at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany, I'm finishing up dual master's degrees in Physics and Computational Sciences, building on my bachelor's in Physics and Mathematics.
One thing I really enjoy about my work is how varied the problems are. In the past couple years I've worked on weather simulations, the counterintuitive rattleback dynamics, water wave modeling, and now geothermal energy systems. Keeps things interesting.
I believe in being transparent about the AI tools I use. I maintain a detailed AI Code of Conduct documenting how I use AI tools (Claude, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot) in my academic work, emphasizing verification, understanding, and maintaining intellectual integrity.
Currently I am working on GPU-accelerated simulations of geothermal well arrays using Julia at MIT's Julia Lab with Prof. Alan Edelman and Prof. Robert Metcalfe. More to come here soon (when I have nice picss to share).
I worked on dispersive shallow water equations. The following visualization shows the evolution of a wave over Gaussian bathymetry, using the hyperbolic approximation of the Serre–Green–Naghdi equations in two dimensions. The simulation employs a new energy-conserving semi-discretization that maintains physical properties over long time integrations. I also worked quite a bit on DispersiveShallowWater.jl, a Julia package that implements structure-preserving numerical methods for one-dimensional dispersive shallow water models. Both supervised by Prof. Dr. Hendrik Ranocha.
For my (maths) bachelor thesis, I simulated the movement of the rattleback (German: Wackelstein), a semi-ellipsoid with an inhomogeneous mass distribution that exhibits quite counterintuitive behavior: it can spontaneously reverse its spinning direction. This phenomenon defies intuition but follows directly from the solutions of its equations of motion. Supervised by Prof. Dr. Hendrik Ranocha and Univ.-Prof. Dr. Elmar Schömer.
For this work, I received the best bachelor's thesis in mathematics of the year award.
I like to contribute to the Julia open-source community. Here are some of my contributions to other people's repos.
For my full CV as PDF:
View PDFVisiting Student, MIT (Sep 2025–May 2026)
Master Thesis Research with Prof. Alan Edelman and Prof. Robert Metcalfe
Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (Oct 2019–May 2026)
Teaching Assistant, Theoretical Physics (2021–2023)
Is there anything nicer than recommending a book and having someone not only read, but actually enjoy
it??
Anyway, here are some of my book recs:
