Research
I am a computational geodynamicist specializing in numerical modeling of tectonics, thermochronology, and surface–crust interactions. As a core developer of DynEarthSol in the GeoFLAC organization, I work on the physics (surface processes, magma migration, two-phase flow) and the performance (GPU parallelization with OpenACC/CUDA, million-element scaling) of long-term tectonic simulation. My current research at UT Austin models ice shell convection and chaos terrain on Jupiter's moon Europa.
Continental rifting and sedimentary basins
How do rift basins grow, fill, and heat up? I simulate the coupled evolution of faulting, sedimentation, and thermal structure during continental rifting with DynEarthSol, from fault strain partitioning to syn-rift stratigraphy.
Applications include the North West Shelf of Australia, where rifting models provided heat-flow histories for hydrocarbon maturity estimation in a funded collaboration with Taiwan CPC Corporation and National Taiwan University (2024).
Magma migration and volcanic rifting
3D simulation of magma migration during continental breakup — dike intrusion, oceanic crust formation, and the transition from magma-poor to volcanic rifting, applied to the Afar rift.
This work added efficient 3D magma migration to DynEarthSol and was presented at the AGU Fall Meeting 2025 and the CIG Community Workshop 2025.
Europa ice shell dynamics
Two-phase flow in ice: I develop robust melt-migration algorithms under the explicit FLAC scheme to model convection in Europa's ice shell and the formation of its enigmatic chaos terrain.
Current postdoctoral project at UT Austin Institute for Geophysics (2026 – ), benchmarked against solitary-wave solutions and FLAC reference models.
Taiwan orogeny and thermochronology
Reconstructing mountain building from cooling ages: zircon fission-track thermochronology combined with thermal–mechanical modeling of the Hsuehshan Range and the Taiwan orogeny.
Results published in Tectonophysics (2023) and Science Advances (2024), resolving the exhumation history of the middle Hsuehshan Range.