Andrew A. Oliva

Biography

Dr. Andrew Oliva is an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department of Michigan Technological University. He has 4 years of experience in the gas turbine industry with Pratt & Whitney, focusing on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations and airfoil design for military fans. During his 6 years of graduate studies, Dr. Oliva designed and implemented subsonic wind tunnels, applied advanced fluid measurement techniques, and developed expertise in data analysis. With over 12 years of CFD experience, his work spans internal subsonic, supersonic, and hypersonic flows as well as external hypersonic flows. His expertise also includes physics-based reduced-order modeling, machine learning, and analytical methods for quasi-one-dimensional flows. Dr. Oliva holds a B.Sc. from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering from the University of Notre Dame. His research interests encompass multi-physics simulations, hypersonic and chemically reacting flows, weakly ionized plasma, entropy transport, unsteady fluid mechanics, turbomachinery, computational physics algorithms, optimal approximation techniques, and physics-based reduced order modeling.

He is recruiting graduate students (PhD-track preferred; MS welcome) and undergraduates for research in high-speed propulsion, aerothermodynamics, aero-optics, and reduced-order modeling. Projects focus on computational simulation (with and without coding), analytic modeling, and data analysis. Email aoliva@mtu.edu with a one-page CV or resume, relevant courses, tools you use (e.g., Python, C/C++, OpenFOAM, ANSYS Fluent/CFX), an unofficial transcript, and a brief statement of what you want to learn or hope to research. For those already at MTU, please indicate your weekly availability. Please use the subject line “Research Interest.”