21 Nov K&C Welcomes Dr. Mike Hillman as Principal Scientist
K&C welcomes Dr. Mike Hillman as a member of K&C’s technical staff. Dr. Hillman joins K&C as a Principal Scientist and will be working to advance K&C’s numerical codes (click here to learn more about K&C’s meshfree solver FEMFRE) and multi-physics modeling and simulation techniques. Dr. Hillman is an expert in meshfree methods, having authored over 30 publications and presented over 90 talks at national and international conferences including keynotes. He is the coauthor of a new book “Meshfree and Particle Methods” to be released in 2023. Dr. Hillman holds a BS in Civil Engineering from Cal State Fullerton, and an MS and PhD in Civil Engineering from UCLA.
Before joining K&C, Dr. Hillman was an Associate Professor and endowed Kimball Early Career Professor of Civil Engineering at Penn State. Dr. Hillman’s research focus is computational mechanics, with an emphasis on fundamental development of meshfree methods for the effective application to structural and material failure. He brings 13 years’ experience developing explicit dynamic finite element and meshfree solvers, where his research has been implemented into codes used by the DOD and DOE, the commercial software LS-DYNA, and codes used by private industry. Dr. Hillman is the originator of the concept of variationally consistent integration, which allows unprecedented accuracy in challenging applications such as penetration/fragment-impact, blast-loaded structures, landslides, explosive welding, earth moving, and 3D printing. He has extensively developed advanced nodal integration schemes and shock treatments for accelerated and robust meshfree computations in these problems. In 2020, Hillman received the NSF CAREER Award based on a new hybrid meshfree method that allowed convergent solutions in non-local particle methods for the first time.