About
I came from Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. I obtained my B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology in December 2011 and December 2018, respectively. I also held a M.S. in Applied Mathematics from Georgia Southern University in May 2014. My academic advisor is Prof. Yan Wang (Georgia Tech), and my postdoc mentor is Dr. Tim Wildey (SNL).
Upon graduation, I joined Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, NM in January 2019 as a postdoctoral appointee and became a LTE Senior Member of Technical Staff in Optimization and Uncertainty Quantification in September 2020.
I'm also a Dakota developer, mainly responsible for implementing efficient global optimization (EGO) extensions, e.g. different flavors of parallelizations.
My research is somewhat centered around Gaussian processes and Bayesian optimization, but recently I have been very attracted to machine learning and deep learning in general. I'm interested in nearly anything about applied mathematics, inverse problems, computational statistics, Bayesian statistics, Monte Carlo approaches, computational materials science, computational fluid dynamics, deep learning, reinforcement learning, and of course, anything in between. I mostly use open-source software for research because they are freely available and I'm not bounded by the legal constraints (MATLAB is a different story). You can read more about the software I used in my research.
I have a particular impression for people who dare to question orthodoxy and bring revolutionary questions to life, for what is lacking is not superficial design, but imagination greater than reality. I also have a deep admiration for those who choose to open-source their codes so that others can use for free, and those who publish bad results. I'm a regular coffee drinker, an amateur badminton and chess player.
If you have a problem and think that I can help with, please reach out to me at either (anhtran [at] sandia [dot] gov) or (anh.vt2 [at] gmail [dot] com).
Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward. They may be beaten, but they may start a winning game. -- Johann von Goethe