Dr. N Sukumar

Biography

N. Sukumar is a Professor in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Davis. He completed his Ph.D. in 1998 at Northwestern University. His research interests are primarily in the areas of computational solid mechanics and applied mathematics, with particular emphasis on the development of new methods for modeling fracture in materials and conducting ab initio electronic-structure calculations using Kohn-Sham equations and Density Functional Theory. Prof. Sukumar has contributed to the fields of virtual element methods, physics-informed neural networks, generalized barycentric coordinates, cubature rules for polytopes, and curved geometries. He also investigates maximum-entropy methods in mechanics, convex optimization, semidefinite programming, deep learning, stochastic partial differential equations, uncertainty quantification, and parallel computing. Additionally, he serves as a Regional Editor for the International Journal of Fracture and is part of the editorial board for Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering. Before joining UC Davis, he held a research associate position in Theoretical & Applied Mechanics and has a Master’s degree from OGI and a Bachelor’s from IIT Bombay.

Research Interests