I'm Alasdair/Ali, a PhD Candidate at the University of Michigan's MDO Lab. I'm interested in developing methods that might make high-fidelity MDO (multidisciplinary design optimisation) a practical tool for designing the next generation of highly flexible aircraft.

In my MSc thesis, and the corresponding conference paper, I expanded the MDO Lab's MACH framework to enable the use of geometrically nonlinear finite element models which are critical for accurately modelling the aeroelastic behaviour of very flexible wings.

In my PhD, I initially worked on an Airbus funded project, developing a geometrically nonlinear flutter constraint for aerostructural optimisation. Now I'm back to working on MDO with high-fidelity geometrically nonlinear finite element models, now using the open-source TACS and MPhys libraries.