Since 15 October 2020, Dr.-Ing. Andrea Beck has held the Dorothea-Erxleben Guest Professorship at the Otto von Guericke University in Magdeburg. Andrea Beck was previously an academic assistant in the Numerical Methods group of Claus-Dieter Munz at the Institute of Aerodynamics and Gas Dynamics at the University of Stuttgart. At the same time, she was a postdoc in the Cluster of Excellence SimTech, where she worked on the development of data-based closure methods for turbulence simulation in the PN1-1 project "Data-Driven Subrigid-Closure Models for Simulating Turbulent Multi-phase Flow". Using neural networks and related methods, model terms are reconstructed which not only approximate the physical aspects of closure but also include the discretization of the basic procedure. This combination of mathematically and physically motivated modeling approaches and machine learning therefore allows to derive "tailor-made" turbulence models.
With the Dorothea Erxleben Guest Professorship, the Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg has been promoting excellent female scientists since 1997/98 and intensively supports their further professional and personal profiling. The teaching and research contract was previously awarded for a period of one year and, since 2018, for two years for a subject represented at the university, especially in areas in which women are underrepresented. The professorship is named after Dorothea Erxleben, who was the first German woman to receive a medical doctorate in 1754.
"The Dorothea-Erxleben Guest Professorship is a great opportunity for me, and I am very happy about it. It offers me the opportunity to advance and expand my research and to include new perspectives from my new environment. I am looking forward to working together with the new colleagues in Magdeburg and to successfully continuing the collaboration with colleagues in Stuttgart," said Andrea Beck, underlining the opportunities of the visiting professorship.
In Magdeburg, Andrea Beck works at the Institute of Fluid Dynamics and Thermodynamics (ISUT). She will focus on the combination of machine learning methods and simulation techniques for flows. In a second research focus, Ms. Beck is dealing with the simulation of particle and droplet flows in complex components.
Ms. Beck will continue her successful work at the University of Stuttgart, especially with SimTech and the two institutes Institute of Aerodynamics and Gas Dynamics (IAG) and Institute of Aircraft Propulsion Systems (ILA), and will also continue to supervise the research projects in presence and virtually, as well as be active in teaching.
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