Graduate Dean Awards Dissertation Fellowship to Ajinkya Desai

Sep. 3, 2024 - The UC Irvine Graduate Division awarded a Graduate Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship to Ajinkya Desai, a civil and environmental engineering doctoral candidate. The $5,000 summer stipend allows students who are nearing completion of their dissertations to forgo nonresearch-related employment and concentrate on completing their degree.

Desai currently works with Associate Professor Tirtha Banerjee researching wildland fire-atmosphere interaction, specifically plume behavior in different environments. He conducts computer simulations on fire behavior in forested and grassland environments to compare how fire plumes differ in these environments. He also studies how spatially separated plumes interact to better understand how small fires merge to form large, complex fires.

Desai’s research could help design effective strategies for faster wildland-fire containment and aims to improve human health and safety conditions by creating more reliable and detailed computer models of fire-spread behavior in a wider range of environmental conditions. Desai said the high-performance computing cluster at UCI affords him multiple reiterations and continuous realignment when exploring these cases. “By allowing me to focus entirely on research in my dissertation year, the fellowship, along with the state-of-the-art facilities at UCI, helps me explore multiple approaches in my dissertation research and obtain a more comprehensive understanding of plume behavior in varied environments.”

Desai also received the Public Impact Fellowship earlier this year and the Henry Samueli Endowed Fellowship in 2023. He expects to graduate by summer 2025 and aims to continue collaborating with fire-behavior researchers as a postdoctoral research specialist.

– Lilith Christopher