Shane Stevenson

Incoming PhD Student, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

University of California, San Diego

I am an incoming PhD student in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at UC San Diego, where I will be advised by Prof. Boris Kramer. My research focuses on advancing theory and computation for modeling, inference, and control of dynamical systems, particularly those that are noisy and partially observed, with reduced-order modeling and machine learning as core tools.

Before joining UCSD, I completed my undergraduate degree at San Diego State University, where I double-majored in Computer Science and Computational Mathematics. I was a member of the SDSU Climate Informatics Lab under Prof. Sam Shen, where I worked primarily on using, testing, and fine-tuning large-scale weather forecasting models, as well as promoting model democracy by making these tools accessible to smaller university research groups. I was also a member of the SDSU Machine Vision and Perception Lab under Prof. Xiaobai Liu, where I helped build simulation environments for training robotic agents.

Underlying my research is a commitment to writing fast, sustainable research software. I care deeply about readability, and I think a lot about how we translate mathematical methods into code so that researchers from different backgrounds can easily read, run, and adapt the implementations to their own work. My aim is software that grows richer and more self-sustaining as a community of users builds on top of it.