December 2015 - New Employees

Leen Alawieh

Leen Alawieh, CRD

As a new postdoctoral fellow in Berkeley Lab’s Center for Computational Sciences and Engineering (CSEE), Leen Alawieh will be integrating experimental observations with numerical simulations and mathematical formulations to quantify uncertainties in models of complex physical systems.

“There has been a general consensus among researchers to shift from the strict deterministic to the probabilistic interpretation of physical model predictions,” says Alawieh. “This is instigated by the multitude of uncertainties that taint physical systems both in experiments and models. Accounting for these uncertainties can sometimes lead to widely different model predictions, which could have serious impacts on scientific insights, designs and decisions that rely on these predictions.” 

Although her work on uncertainty quantification methods in CSEE will focus primarily on combustion applications, she notes that it will also be applicable to other research areas like climate and earthquake forecasts, carbon sequestration, as well as material design and optimization.

Originally from Lebanon, Alawieh completed her undergraduate studies in Chemistry at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon. Shortly after, she came to the United States as a Fulbright Scholar and pursued a Master’s degree in Physical Chemistry and Physics from the University of Texas, Austin (UT Austin). She earned her PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University. And before coming to Berkeley Lab, Alawieh developed algorithms for extreme-scale Bayesian inverse problems and the stochastic representation of model inadequacy as a postdoc at UT Austin’s Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences.

In her free time, she enjoys doing indoor and outdoor sports activities, attending live music concerts and theater performances, as well as reading.