CV

PhD

University of Texas at Austin

Computational Science, Engineering, and Mathematics

• Co-Advisors: Dr. Karen Willcox & Dr. Anirban Chaudhuri

M.S.

University of Texas at Austin

Computational Science, Engineering, and Mathematics

B.S.

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Aerospace Engineering, Minor in Computer Science

AI/ML Resident

Google

• AI/ML R&D for an undisclosed project related to finance, decarbonization, and climate at X, the moonshot factory.

Data Scientist Intern

Toyota

• Built a time-series analysis tool and an end-to-end testing method in Python to replace human-in-the-loop process saving in excess of 10% in operating costs
• Expedited data analysis timeline by 90% by building an ETL pipeline for wind tunnel data

Graduate Research Assistant

Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences

• Developing interpretable multi-fidelity (MF) deep learning and linear regression methods for high-dimensional, data-scarce problems on HPCs, resulting in 2 journal publications to date
• Contributed to DARPA-funded open-source causal inference and dynamical systems modeling toolkit by developing testing frameworks, validating methods using ODE-based COVID-19 epidemiological models
• Applied MF neural networks to airfoil optimization and MF linear regression to hypersonic vehicle pressure field prediction, achieving >95% accuracy at the same cost as single-fidelity methods

Research Intern

National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)

• Investigated the explainability of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in TensorFlow through saliency maps and first principles yielding a contribution in a publication
• Constructed CNNs to predict Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) computational fluid dynamics results from flow field and geometrical information

Undergraduate Research Assistant

UIUC Electric Propulsion Laboratory

• Created analytical model based off incompressible Navier-Stokes equation and control volume analysis of thrust stand to understand theoretical guarantees
• Improved electric micro-propulsion thrust stand accuracy by over 90% through hardware improvements

Undergraduate Research Assistant

UIUC Aerospace Controls & Optimization Group

• Translated model predictive control code in MATLAB to C++ through the IPOPT library

Projection-based multifidelity linear regression for data-scarce applications

Machine Learning for Computational Science and Engineering

Machine Learning for Computational Science and Engineering 1, no. 2 (2025): 47.

Multifidelity linear regression for scientific machine learning from scarce data

Foundations of Data Science

Foundations of Data Science 7, no. 1 (2025): 271-297.

Improving neural network efficiency with multifidelity and dimensionality reduction techniques

AIAA SciTech 2025 Forum

AIAA SciTech 2025 Forum, p. 2807.

Projection-based multifidelity linear regression for data-poor applications

AIAA SciTech 2023 Forum

AIAA SciTech 2023 Forum, p. 0916.

Turbomachinery blade surrogate modeling using deep learning

International Conference on High Performance Computing

Springer International Publishing, pp. 92-104.

Development of a nytrox-paraffin hybrid rocket engine

AIAA Propulsion and Energy 2020 Forum

AIAA Propulsion and Energy 2020 Forum, p. 3729.

Surrogate modeling for data-scarce applications using projection-based multifidelity linear regression

Vignesh Sella, Julie Pham, Anirban Chaudhuri, Karen Willcox

Model Reduction and Surrogate Modeling 2024 (MORe24)

Multifidelity linear regression via a combined loss function for data-constrained applications

Vignesh Sella, Julie Pham, Anirban Chaudhuri, Karen Willcox

WCCM 2024

Take your hobbies seriously!

Vignesh Sella

Google X Belonging Talks

Geospatial Foundation Models for Learned Feature Embeddings in Ecological Systems

Vignesh Sella, Greg Bronevetsky

Google X Technical Talk

Google Belonging Award

Google

Dean's List

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

2019-2021

William R. Schowalter Scholarship

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Research Support Grant

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

French Merit Award

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Student Sustainability Grant

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign