I was born in Moscow and lived there until 1992, when I immigrated to the U.S. (Detroit, MI area) with my parents. I moved to Philadelphia in 2002, when I started as an undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania. I was in a combined Bachelors/Masters program in pure Mathematics at Penn and graduated with both degrees and a University Minor in Actuarial Science in May 2006. My Masters thesis advisor at Penn was Dr. Alexandre Kirillov.

As of June 2011, I have completed my Ph.D. at Stanford's Institute for Mathematical and Computational Engineering (iCME). My dissertation advisor was Dr. Charbel Farhat, Chairman of the Aeronautics & Astronautics Department at Stanford, and I was a member of the Farhat Research Group (FRG). My Ph.D. work focused on developing the so-called Discontinuous Enrichment Method (DEM) in finite elements to the advection-diffusion equation for use in fluid applications. During my last three years at Stanford, I was the Financial Officer and Webmaster of Stanford's Chapter of the Society for Industrial & Applied Mathematics (SIAM).

As of October 2011, I am a member of Senior Technical Staff in the Numerical Analysis and Algorithms group at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, NM. The URL of my (new!) Sandia website is www.sandia.gov/~ikalash. To e-mail me at my Sandia account, click here. Prior to accepting a full-time position at Sandia, I had had the opportunity to work there while a graduate student. From 2007-2010, I was a Graduate Technical Intern in the Aerosciences Department. My main project in Aerosciences focused on developing and performing mathematical analyses of Reduced Order Models (ROMs) for compressible flow. I was also involved in a turbulence modeling project, in which a novel approach to computing turbulent pressure fluctuations on a body was proposed.

Some of my non-academic interests include reading, writing, working out, hiking, traveling, cars/driving (hey, I grew up in the Motor City!), and having interesting discussions/debates with people about a wide range of topics .

More information can be found by clicking the links on the left. Or feel free to contact me with any questions, comments, opinions, etc. regarding iCME, Stanford, SIAM, Sandia, math, or life in general.

If you want to see what I might look like as a Simpsons character, click here.