Dr. Kokkolaras of McGill

This past Friday, Dr. Michael Kokkolaras from McGill University gave a guest lecture on Mesh Adaptive Direct Search (MADS) as the penultimate ASME UD speaker series event of the spring 2018 semester.

Dr. Michael Kokkolaras ventured all the way from Montreal, Canada to give this talk entitled “A practical yet rigorous optimization framework for computational design optimization”. This lecture was run in the same style as the Mechanical Engineering Department Speaker Series events—with food, format, and location the same—except that ASME UD President Christopher Kitson moderated the lecture itself. At the conclusion of the talk, Dr. Michael Kokkolaras was presented with a small token of thanks and take out to lunch at Iron Hill Brewery afterwards.

It turns out that this visiting professor is personal friends with a number of mechanical engineering faculty, including UD President Dennis Assanis, from his time at Michigan State University and was quite happy to see them again. This event would not have happened without the excellent support of our ASME UD faculty advisor, Dr. Andreas Malikopoulos, who organized this event and all of the logistics therein. Thank you to all who helped make this event a success!