Alp Dener, a postdoctoral appointee in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory, is sharing first place in the 2018 American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Multidisciplinary Design Optimization Student Paper Competition.

The AIAA conference brings together users, developers, and researchers to present the latest theoretical and computational developments, applications, ideas, and problems in the field of multidisciplinary analysis, design, and optimization. The student paper competition is open to both undergraduate and graduate students; and the papers are judged for originality of work, the paper’s potential importance to the field, and the clarity of presentation.

Dener received his Ph.D. in aeronautical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2017. The award-winning paper. ​“Enabling Modular Aerostructural Optimization: Individual Discipline Feasible without the Jacobians,” was based on his thesis work, for which he developed a matrix-free multidisciplinary design optimization algorithm tailored for large-scale engineering problems and demonstrated its efficacy on test problems drawn from the aerospace industry.

At Argonne, building on his past efforts, Dener is developing and implementing gradient-based optimization algorithms in the Toolkit for Advanced Optimization, with particular emphasis on the efficient treatment of nonlinear state-based constraints.