Henning S. Mortveit is an associate professor at the Biocomplexity Institute and in the Department of Engineering Systems and Environment. 

Research Interests

How can we make a city and its physical infrastructures more resilient? How can existing infrastructures be modified to make a city more robust to disasters? How do we reason about these questions in rigorous and efficient ways?  Modern cities are examples of highly complex systems that can be captured as massively interacting systems whose network components co-evolve with time. To capture these systems in a precise mathematical manner is a challenge that must address:

• modeling power
• ability to analytically analyze and validate mathematical models
• ability to efficiently implement models (construct simulation models) on current, high-performance hardware
• scalability to accommodate simulation analysis needs in a timely manner

Mortveit’s research involves all these aspects and is rooted in the framework of Graph Dynamical Systems (GDS). This class of dynamical systems was introduced as a natural mathematical framework that permits precise modeling of massively interacting systems, and it addresses all the challenges above. His work covers both fundamental theory of GDS and its applications to system design, modeling, and analysis.  Part of his work covers software and system design for scalable, scientific computing. Ensuring scientifically reproducible computation for large-scale simulation models is quite complex. Tracking all data sources, their provenance, their transformations to fit required input formats, the tracking of the tools and algorithms used to transform the data, as well as the simulation models that were used, give rise to many challenges. This work addresses this problem as well as efficient ways to add and combine simulation models for innovative and rapid modeling and analysis with integrated validation and data quality assessments.  Mortveit enjoys scientific visualization of spatial phenomena, in particular illustrations of dynamics of large, interaction-based systems involving synthetic information.  

Keywords: Graph Dynamical Systems // Simulation Science // Stability Analysis (e.g., verification and validation, and sensitivity analysis)

Education

Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Mathematics, Ph.D. 2000 
Norwegian Institute of Technology, Mathematics, M.S. 1995

Professional Preparation 

Los Alamos National Laboratory, Mathematics and Simulation, Postdoctoral Associate, 2000-2002  
Los Alamos National Laboratory, Mathematics and Simulation, Staff member, 2002-2005  
Virginia Tech, Department of Mathematics, and Biocomplexity Institute, Associate Professor, 2005-2018