Bio
Muralikrishnan (Murali) Gopalakrishnan Meena is a Computational Scientist (R&D Staff) in the Advanced Computing for Life Sciences & Engineering group at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF). His research lies at the convergence of high-performance computing, AI/ML, and quantum computing, with a focus on advancing large-scale model architectures (transformers, vision transformers, neural operators, diffusion) and quantum-classical hybrid algorithms for scientific problems. He develops and benchmarks these methods on DOE leadership computing systems, and applies them across fluid dynamics, climate, biology, and imaging.
Murali leads OLCF's Quantum Computing for Fluid Dynamics Working Group, a multi-institutional consortium advancing quantum and quantum-classical hybrid algorithms for scientific computing, and coordinates the Data Science Subgroup of the STRATA Research Group on machine learning for turbulence modeling. His current work spans deep learning for scientific problems - including surrogate and foundation models for turbulence, biomedical imaging, and other physical systems - and quantum algorithm design and benchmarking on near-term hardware, as well as graph-theoretic and network-based methods for complex systems in physical and biological sciences. He collaborates with users of OLCF's leadership computing resources across these areas, mentors postdocs and early-career researchers, and contributes to building bridges between AI, quantum computing, and high-performance computing.
Murali joined OLCF as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in 2020, working on machine-learned subgrid-scale closures for atmospheric turbulence. He obtained his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2020, where he developed network-community-based frameworks for characterizing, modeling, and controlling vortical interactions in turbulent and wake flows. Beyond fluids, he has extended these tools to biological problems including biomedical imaging, microbe-host interactions, and whole-cell modeling.
Outside of work, Murali enjoys sailing, swimming, yoga, and painting.
Education
- Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Mechanical Engineering - 2020, University of California, Los Angeles
- Master of Science (M.S.) in Mechanical Engineering - 2018, Florida State University
- Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech.) in Mechanical Engineering - 2014, Cochin University of Science & Technology, India
Trademarks and Patents
- M. Gopalakrishnan Meena, M. J. Lane, A. G. Geiger, and D. A. Jacobson "metnet-direct-auxiliary", Certificate of U.S. Copyright Registration, Copyright Number: 90000309, Registration number: TXU002420465.