HELLO and welcome to my web page. I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geodetic Engineering (CEGE) at The Ohio State University and the director of The Computational Hydrodynamics and Informatics Laboratory (The CHIL).

MY BACKGROUND: I come from a family of engineers, both my maternal grandfather and my father were professional engineers. (The latter a professional civil engineer and surveyor, the former an industrial and mechanical engineer.) I obtained my BS in civil engineering from the Pennsylvania State University, where I was part of the University Scholars Program (now the Schreyer Honors College). As a University Scholar, I had the opportunity to participate in undergraduate research, which introduced me to the subject of finite element methods, my main area of research to this day.

After completing my undergraduate degree , I worked as a civil engineer for three years at my father’s company, E.J. Kubatko Jr. and Associates, in Kittanning, PA (a small town in western PA just north of Pittsburgh) before returning to school to pursue a PhD at the University of Notre Dame, where I worked with Joannes Westerink. Following my time at Notre Dame, I was a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (ICES) at the University of Texas at Austin (now the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering & Sciences), working with Clint Dawson, before I joined OSU in 2008.

MY RESEARCH INTERESTS: My primary research interests are in the development, implementation, analysis, and application of computational models (mainly finite element models) for fluid flow and transport processes. The main goal of this research is the development and application of next-generation, high-performance computing tools, which utilize state-of-the-art methods and algorithms, that can be used to help solve a wide range of problems of societal interest. In the context of my own research, for example, the developed computational tools have been used to study hurricane storm surge and to assess the impacts of sea-level rise. The research is highly interdisciplinary in nature, involving aspects of, not only engineering, but also applied mathematics, physical oceanography and computer science.

A significant portion of my research has been in the area of high-order Runge–Kutta discontinuous Galerkin finite element methods applied to hyperbolic and advection-dominated conservation laws, with a specific focus in shallow water modeling. This work is directed towards the development of a high-order, fully-coupled model system for simulating problems of a multi-physics/multi-scale nature (waves, currents, sediment transport, overland flow), all within a petascale (and beyond) computing environment. Some of my most recent work is focused on the development of adaptive multi-physics/multi-dimensional modeling approaches for overland flooding that are designed to adaptively switch between various models in order to simultaneously optimize physical correctness and computational efficiency. The development of these types of adaptive and high-order approaches — which have not yet been fully realized in large-scale, operational codes — along with the supporting concepts and numerical tools that make their application to full-scale problems possible, is one of the main thrusts of my research. A complete list of my publications can be found here.