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Louis-Noël Moresi | |
|---|---|
| Born | (1965-10-30)30 October 1965 (age 59) |
| Alma mater | Clare College, Cambridge |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | computer science, geophysics |
| Institutions | Kodak Caltech CSIRO Monash University Melbourne University ANU] |
Louis-Noël MoresiFAA (born 30 October 1965) is a Professor of Computational Mathematics & Geophysics atThe Australian National University. He has deeply influenced the understanding of the Geophysics community through his own research as well as providing software for the community to use.
The London-born Moresi began his scientific career atKodak as a research assistant in 1985 where he worked with Dr John Goddard on the synthesis of stabilizers (anti-oxidants) for yellow dyes in photographic emulsions. In the same year, he began undergraduate studies atClare College, Cambridge at theUniversity of Cambridge. There he completed a Natural SciencesTripos in 1988, with final year options in Seismology, Physics of the Earth and Environmental Science, taking classes underDan McKenzie. In his last year he received the Horn Prize for his results in his final examinations.
From 1988 to 1992, he completed his doctoral studies in the Department of Earth Sciences at theUniversity of Oxford. He focused his PhD thesis on the influence ofmantle convection on surface observables such asTopography andGeoid. His particular emphasis was on the role of temperature-dependent viscosity and partial melting for bothEarth andVenus.
From 1992 to 1995 he worked as a fellow in geophysics atCaltech. There he worked withMike Gurnis on 3D dynamic models ofSubduction in the North West Pacific Ocean as well as mantle convection in Earth and Venus withSlava Solomatov. After this he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Research School of Earth Sciences atANU until 1997. Then he moved toPerth where he worked forCSIRO in the division of exploration and mining as a senior research scientist. There he studied large-scale continental deformation interacting with mantle convection.
In 2002 he moved toMonash University, where he was a professor as well as the co-director of Monash Cluster Computing, aparallel computing research centre. He was on the Australian Research Council College of Experts from 2012-2014. In 2014, he moved toMelbourne University through the Research at Melbourne Accelerator Program as a professor of geophysics. In 2019 he moved back toThe Australian National University Research School of Earth Sciences as a Professor of Geophysics.
It was during Moresi's time atCaltech that he wrote the popular mantle convection software program callCitcom. This is a 2D and 3DEulerianFinite Element code which is designed to solve problems with extremely large variations in viscosity. Though it was originally aCartesianserial code, there are currently many versions, including a spherical parallel version called CitComS (seeCitcom for code's history).
During his time atCSIRO, he reworkedCitcom using theParticle-in-cell approach and created a new program calledEllipsis. Having lagrangian integration points meant that the scientist using the code could track history and material properties through time. This allowed complex rheologies and geometries to be modelled easily and flexibly. ThoughEllipsis only worked in 2D and in serial, it was extremely popular in the geophysics community.
Moresi, in partnership with theVictorian Partnership for Advanced Computing, and then later withAuScope continues to develop a parallel 3D version of Ellipsis calledUnderworld. He is the Program Directory of AuScope Simulation and Modelling (Australian national geoscience infrastructure program funded through NCRIS.
Moresi was elected a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society in 2000.Moresi was elected a Fellow of theAmerican Geophysical Union in 2017.[1]Moresi was elected a Fellow of theAustralian Academy of Science in 2023.[2]
