Anantha Narayanan Suresh Babu

Anantha Narayanan Suresh Babu is a PhD candidate whose research combines computational modeling, uncertainty quantification, Bayesian learning, and scientific machine learning, with applications to sea ice and ocean dynamics. Sea ice is rapidly changing, and submesoscale currents have recently been found to be ubiquitous in the upper ocean. Anantha’s work seeks to broaden our modeling of these complex, nonlinear sea ice and submesoscale dynamics, by melding fundamental physics with limited data. Supported by a MathWorks Fellowship, he is developing probabilistic models and using Bayesian and machine learning to create sea ice rheologies and submesoscale closure models. These new learning methods can discriminate between existing models, detect missing physics, and discover new dynamics formulations utilizing only sparse, indirect, and noisy measurements. Anantha’s work relies on his custom MATLAB framework and could yield useful numerical tools and schemes for fellow researchers. His work has the potential to impact both ocean and data sciences. Ultimately, his results could be valuable for climate modeling, environmental monitoring and forecasting, marine ecosystem protection, resource management, maritime transport, and policy and decision-making for the future of our planet.