I don't think anyone should write their autobiography until after they're dead.
-- Samuel Goldwyn

Dr. Matthew Koebbe was educated at:
the University of Missouri-Rolla
B.S. in Mechanical Engineering, 1983
M.S. in Applied Mathematics, 1986
the University of California - Santa Cruz
Ph.D. in Mathematics, 1995

Dr. Koebbe began modeling the world around him as a senior in high school. Intrigued by the promise of solar energy, he built a simple solar oven, covered it with 7 thermistors, and dutifully recorded temperatures every 20 minutes. Simultaneously, he calculated how much solar energy was being funneled into the oven, and used the equations of simple heat transfer to calculate what was being lost -- all by hand. Finally, he plotted the measured and calculated temperatures and wrote a report of the results.

The final report and graphs won a blue ribbon in the city-wide St. Louis Post Dispatch Science Fair. That earned him a Curator's scholarship to the University of Missouri-Rolla. More importantly, it left him with a lifelong fascination with the power of computers and mathematics to accurately predict real-world phenomena.

Dr. Koebbe began his professional career in computational mathematics and modeling by working for an expert witness and a number of engineering firms. There he conducted both analytical and numerical studies of a wide range of mechanical engineering systems. As computational power increased, he was led into performing finite element analysis (FEA) studies of high-speed mechanisms.

Unsatisfied with his level of confidence in the results of his non-linear FEA analyses, he enrolled in the Mathematics doctoral program at UC-Santa Cruz.

While working through his first years of mandatory classes, he co-authored and published several papers describing numerical studies of various nonlinear dynamical systems. This research included a new method of detecting and displaying recurrent data patterns which has spawned additional research at major research laboratories around the world.

In the last years of grad school, he worked in the Scientific Visualization Laboratory of the U. S. Naval Postgraduate School (NPS), Monterey, CA. After earning his doctoral degree in 1995, he ended up running the Lab, visualizing, recording and broadcasting videos on ocean dynamics, aeronautics, robotics, electronics, and earth-sensing simulations.

From 1998 to 2002, Dr. Koebbe practiced customer support, technical writing, sales, marketing, and software development at XYZ Scientific Applications, Inc. XYZSA authors and distributes the TrueGrid FEA and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) preprocessor -- a state-of-the-art preprocessor capable of producing the highest quality parametric meshes for the analysis industry.

Since 2002, Dr. Koebbe has been President of GADAB Engineering, an independent consulting sole proprietorship which specializes in providing mathematical modeling, parametric mesh generation, numerical analysis, scientific visualization, and risk assessment for a broad range of structural and biomechanical engineering systems. He worked with Applied Research Associates (ARA) on the follow-up analysis of the World Trade Center disaster and has modeled several other examples of high-speed impact. In addition, he has worked with companies around the world in scientific visualization: enabling them to discover the hidden results in their analytic datasets.

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www.koebbe.net/gadab/bio.html   14 January 2007