Sara Zahedi

Sara Zahedi is an Iranian-Swedish mathematician who works in computational fluid dynamics and holds a professorship in numerical analysis at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Sweden. She is one of ten winners and the only female winner of the European Mathematical Society Prize for 2016 "for her outstanding research regarding the development and analysis of numerical algorithms for partial differential equations with a focus on applications to problems with dynamically changing geometry". The topic of Zahedi's EMS Prize lecture was her recent research on the CutFEM method of solving fluid dynamics problems with changing boundary geometry, such as arise when simulating the dynamics of systems of two immiscible liquids. This method combines level set methods to represent the domain boundaries as cuts through an underlying uniform grid, together with numerical simulation techniques that can adapt to the complex geometries of grid cells cut by these boundaries.