Biography
I am a computational mechanics PhD student, co-supervised by Dr Tim Hageman and Prof Emilio Martinez-Paneda, and funded through an Oxford-Ashton memorial studentship. My research focus is handwriting phase field multi-physics solvers to better understand hydrogen cracking in ageing gas pipeline welds. A key focus is developing modular, low level computational frameworks that can be adapted for a variety of experiments.
I did my MEng in materials science at Imperial College London, with my masters project on multi-objective optimisation of protein composition for drug design. Professionally, I did a year at Rolls Royce (civil aerospace) as a measurement systems engineer, a summer in a nuclear alloys lab researching AI classification of crystal defects, and a summer at Alloyed (a metal 3d printing consultancy) doing machine automation and probabilistic modelling of Aluminium fatigue.
I also got freelance funding to rewrite my course's atomistic simulation library and have developed other large scientific codebases. These can all be found at github.com/ayhamsaffar.
Research interests
• Continuum mechanics
• Alloy solidification and fatigue
• Scientific software (Python & C++)
