Dr. Stephen Roberts

Biography

Stephen Roberts is the head of the Department of Mathematics at the Australian National University (ANU) and has been actively involved in the computational science community in Australia. He served as the national coordinator for the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC) from 2003 to 2006, overseeing education and outreach training programs. His research centers on developing efficient and robust numerical methods for solving partial differential equations. He is the lead developer of ANU's ANUGA hydrodynamic modeling software, which is an open-source tool designed to model the impact of dam breaks and floods on communities, widely used by councils and government agencies for consulting and engineering purposes. Stephen has also developed sparse grid methods for multidimensional function fitting and approximation of high-dimensional probability density functions. He has a strong background in finite element approximation methods for thin plate spline and functional smoothing at the scale of millions of data points. Stephen earned his MSc in Science from Flinders University in 1980 and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1985, focusing on the convergence of random walk methods for the Burgers equation. His expertise includes computational mathematics, tsunami modeling, flood modeling, and Python programming.

Research Interests