Professor Zachmann's main research interests are computational science and groundwater flow. His interest in groundwater flow modeling has led to a joint appointment in the Civil Engineering Department. Recent projects include international work in groundwater modeling and collaboration with the K-12 community in the areas of computational science and scientific visualization. The term Computational Scientist has been coined to describe scientists, engineers and mathematicians who apply high-performance computational technology in innovative and essential ways to advance the state of knowledge in their respective disciplines. Numerical simulation and experimentation is becoming increasingly accepted as a third methodology in mathematics, engineering and much scientific research.
Numerical simulations fill a gap between physical experiments and analytical approaches.
Numerical experiments provide both qualitative and quantitative insights into many phenomena that are too complex to be dealt with by analytical methods and too expensive or dangerous to study via physical experiments. A computational scientist must be well grounded in mathematics, have command of an applied discipline, and must be familiar with leading-edge computer architectures and the data structure issues. Additionally, scientific visualization for the pre-processing of data sets and the integration of massive amounts of computational results is an essential tool of the computational scientist. This multi-disciplinary activity has given rise to a new way of conducting research. Many mathematical and scientific investigations involve large-scale computer simulations, which in turn require a special class of tools for calibration, debugging and interpretation of results.