Mechanical engineering Ph.D. alumnus Md Badrul Hasan recognized with ASME scholar award

Md Badrul Hasan, Ph.D. ’26, mechanical engineering, has been selected to receive the prestigious Urmila and Karman Ghia Graduate Student Scholar Award. Hasan presented his work at the American Society of Mechanical Engineering (ASME) Fluid Engineering Division’s Summer Conference held July 26-29, 2026, in Bellevue, Washington. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the ASME Fluid Engineering Division. 
Photo: Badrul (at the center) receives the FED 2026 Urmila and Karman Ghia Graduate Student Scholar Award at the ASME Fluids Engineering Division Summer Meeting in Bellevue, Washington, July 2026. He is joined by Ning Zhang, Chair of the ASME Fluids Engineering Division, and Kevin Anderson, Vice Chair. (Photo courtesy of Badrul)

Hasan was recognized for his recent paper, "A Baseline Aposteriori Evaluation of Machine Learning Predicted Eddy Viscosity Fields in Mesoscale Hurricane Boundary Layer Simulations," co-authored with his faculty mentors, Meilin Yu, associate professor of mechanical engineering, and Tim Oates, professor of computer science and electrical engineering. This work addresses the long-standing challenge of hurricane modeling: standard weather models cannot resolve the small turbulent swirls inside a storm, and instead relies on simplified formulas that apply one fixed setting across the entire hurricane. This approach can smooth out critical energy-containing structures within the storm, and lead to prediction uncertainty.

Hasan trained a physics-constrained machine learning model to adapt local model parameters to the flow conditions at each location within the storm. While purely data-driven machine learning models often become unstable in real-world simulations, Hasan’s configurations remained numerically stable throughout the demanding tests. This achievement is a crucial first step toward making these advanced models useful for atmospheric forecasting, Hasan says. 

The work was supported by a 2025-26 College of Engineering and Information Technology Interdisciplinary Proposal award. Hasan presented this research at COEIT Research Day from 2024 through 2026, most recently receiving the 2026 Doctoral Student Award in the Foundations and Applications of Artificial Intelligence category.

“As Badrul's Ph.D. advisor, it has been incredibly rewarding to watch him grow from a new graduate student into an independent researcher in the field of physics-informed machine learning,” says Yu. “I look forward to seeing Badrul continue to advance the field and make lasting contributions to physics-informed machine learning and computational fluid dynamics.”

As part of the award, Hasan will serve on the Computational Fluid Dynamics Technical Committee for the coming year. Following his graduation from UMBC, he will join the Harold Vance Department of Petroleum Engineering at Texas A&M University as a postdoctoral researcher. He will work on an Office of Naval Research-funded project focused on predicting real-time changes to shorelines during storms.